ParlPy 1.0.0

Scraper and utilities for UK Parliamentary bills

ParlPy

Package to scrape and process UK Parliamentary bills, votes and MP contact information.

Written as part of University of Bath Integrated Project module.

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Usage

Install

pipenv install ParlPy==0.1.0

Intended Usage

A list of bills to collect information about is generated using either the update_all_bills_in_session or the get_changed_bills_in_session methods of a BillsOverview object from parlpy.bills.bill_list_fetcher. The former simply gets a list of all bills and places them in member DataFrame bills_overview_data. The latter has persistence, so that its first run behaves like update_all_bills_in_session, but after this places only bills updated after it was last run in the DataFrame.

The BillsOverview object is then passed to todo: iterator

Example Usage

To fetch bills updated since our scraper was last called (uses pickled variable for persistence between program runs)

from parlpy.bills.bill_list_fetcher import BillsOverview

test_fetcher = BillsOverview()
test_fetcher.get_changed_bills_in_session(session_name="All")
print(test_fetcher.bills_overview_data)

... script can stop and be rerun later, next time bills_overview_data will contain fewer items, unless reset_datetime_last_scraped() has been called first, which deletes the pickle file

To fetch all bills and print them:

from parlpy.bills.bill_list_fetcher import BillsOverview

test_fetcher2 = BillsOverview()
test_fetcher2.update_all_bills_in_session()
print(test_fetcher2.bills_overview_data)

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Subpackages

parlpy.bills

parlpy.bills for fetching bill data

Class: BillsOverview

Constructs an object for collecting basic information on all bills in the current Parliamentary session. Its purpose is to

• get a list of existing bills - so that we know what to scrape
• get path to further details for each bill - so that we can assemble the url to scrape further info from

Public instance variables:

• DataFrame : bills_overview_data

  DF containing bill titles, their last updated time and the path to further details on the bill

Public instance methods:

• None : get_changed_bills_in_session(session_name="2019-21", fetch_delay=0)

• None : reset_datetime_last_scraped()

• None : update_all_bills_in_session(session_name="2019-21", fetch_delay=0)

  Method to called to update self.bills_overview_data, fetching pages at maximum rate when fetch_delay=0

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Data Sources and Rationale

A list of extant bills and acts are scraped from https://bills.parliament.uk. Scraping was the only choice for collecting this list as outlined in the bullet points below

• There is an official RSS feed, however this only lists the 50 most recently updated bills, so we do not use this source as we would not have been able to collect older bills.

• The API at https://explore.data.parliament.uk/?endpoint=bills does not contain bills more recent than 2018, so we do not utilise this as it does not present new bills.

• The recent API https://developer.parliament.uk/ does not provide bills.

The package however does make use of the official UK Parliamentary API for collecting division data and for collecting data on MP's.

parlpy.bills.bill_list_fetcher

BillsOverview.get_changed_bills_in_session() and BillsOverview.update_all_bills_in_session()

Both scrape data from https://bills.parliament.uk

parlpy.bills.bill_summary_fetcher

get_summary()

Scrapes data from https://bills.parliament.uk

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Versions

0.1.0

• adds method to get a list only of bills updated since method was last run, uses pickled datetime so that script can be stopped and run as required

0.0.2

• gets a DataFrame containing bill titles, their last updated times and page paths (page paths to be used in future versions)
• page request delay configurable