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Download NHIS Public-Use Linked Mortality Files

Source: R/nhis_mortality.R
nhis_mortality_download.Rd

Downloads the fixed-width .dat mortality files from the CDC FTP server for one or more NHIS survey years. Files are cached locally; re-downloading is skipped unless refresh = TRUE.

Usage

nhis_mortality_download(
  years = NULL,
  refresh = FALSE,
  quiet = !getOption("nhanesR.verbose", TRUE)
)

Arguments

years

Character or numeric vector of NHIS survey years (e.g. "1997" or 1997). Defaults to all years with a public-use LMF. See nhis_lmf_years().

refresh

Logical. Re-download even if a cached file exists? Default FALSE.

quiet

Logical. Suppress download messages? Default uses the nhanesR.verbose option.

Value

Invisibly, a named character vector of local file paths (one per year). The primary side-effect is writing files to the cache directory under mortality/dat/.

Details

NCHS distributes NHIS mortality linkage as one file per survey year (unlike NHANES's one file per 2-year cycle). The public-use LMF provides mortality follow-up through December 31, 2019 for NHIS 1986-2018.

See also

nhis_mortality_parse(), nhis_mortality_link(), nhanes_mortality_download() for the NHANES equivalent.

Examples

# \donttest{
# Download specific years (downloading all 33 available years at once,
# via nhis_mortality_download() with no arguments, works the same way but
# is a much larger multi-file FTP batch -- prefer a specific year vector
# for routine use)
nhis_mortality_download(c("2015", "2016", "2017"))
# }