Convert Lat/Lon to County Codes using FCC API - r

Question

I previously figured out how to convert lattitude/longitude to county FIPS codes using the FCC API (Apply an API Function over 2 columns of Dataframe, Output a Third Column) thanks to #caldwellst and #rohit. Unfortunately, the FCC modified the API and I can't figure out how to fix the code to work again.
Here is a link to the new API: https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/
Here is my dataframe:
> head(df_coords)
# A tibble: 6 x 3
lon lat censusYear
<dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 -112. 33.4 2010
2 -73.2 44.5 2010
3 -88.2 41.9 2010
4 -88.2 41.9 2010
5 -88.4 41.9 2010
6 -77.1 39.0 2010
Here is the function I previously borrowed / adapted as well as the command to run it:
geo2fips <- function(latitude, longitude) {
url <- "https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/block/find?format=json&latitude=%f&longitude=%f"
url <- sprintf(url, latitude, longitude)
json <- RCurl::getURL(url)
json <- RJSONIO::fromJSON(json)
as.character(json$County['FIPS'])
}
df_fips$county_fips <- mapply(geo2fips, df_fips$lat, df_fips$lon)
And here is the error message I get when I run it:
Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) :
Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to geo.fcc.gov:443
Can anyone help me figure this out? I figured it may be related to a requirement for census year, so I tried to modify the code as follows but it returned the same error message:
geo2fips <- function(latitude, longitude, censusYear) {
+ url <- "https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/block/find?format=json&latitude=%f&longitude=%f&censusYear=%f"
+ url <- sprintf(url, latitude, longitude, censusYear)
+ json <- RCurl::getURL(url)
+ json <- RJSONIO::fromJSON(json)
+ as.character(json$County['FIPS'])
+ }
> df_coords$county_fips <- mapply(geo2fips, df_coords$lat, df_coords$lon, df_coords$censusYear)
Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) :
Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to geo.fcc.gov:443
>
Huge thank you to anyone who can help. -Mike

Answer 1

There's been a slight change to the URL and parameters - you can use:
geo2fips <- function(latitude, longitude) {
url <- "https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/area?lat=%f&lon=%f&format=json"
res <- jsonlite::fromJSON(sprintf(url, latitude, longitude))[["results"]][["county_fips"]]
unique(res)
}
You can also simplify things a little if you use the jsonlite package instead of RSJONIO as the former accepts connections directly.