Setting a cache directory

Spatial data from the US Census Bureau can get very big - sometimes hundreds of megabytes in size. By default, tigris functions download data from the US Census Bureau's website - but this can get tiresome if downloading the same large datasets over and over. To resolve this, tigris includes an option to cache downloaded data on a user's computer for future use, meaning that files only have to be downloaded from the Census website once. In this exercise, you'll get acquainted with the caching functionality in tigris.

Use a simulated version of the tigris_cache_dir() function to set a hypothetical cache directory.
Set the tigris_use_cache option to TRUE to tell tigris to cache shapefiles.
Use getOption() to check that you've modified the cache option correctly.

Exercise

Setting a cache directory

Instructions