bulletin-fetcher 0.2.0

A Python library for programmatic access to EU official bulletins

bulletin-fetcher

Description

bulletin-fetcher is a Python library for programmatic access to legal acts published in official bulletins, with current support for the Official Journal of the European Union through the EUR-Lex / Cellar SPARQL endpoint.

The library provides a high-level Python API that allows developers, researchers and legal-domain experts to search EU legal acts without writing SPARQL queries directly.

Why bulletin-fetcher?

EU legal acts can be queried through public semantic web infrastructure, but using the underlying SPARQL endpoint requires knowledge of RDF vocabularies, query structure and EUR-Lex metadata conventions and ontologies.

bulletin-fetcher abstracts this complexity behind a simple Python interface. Users can retrieve legal acts by publication date, date ranges, act type, publishing institution and textual content, while receiving Python objects or CSV outputs suitable for further analysis.

Main features

• Search EU legal acts from the Official Journal of the European Union.
• Filter acts by date or date range, act type, publishing institution, text contained in the act title, language.
• Retrieve available act types and publishing institutions.
• Export act search results to CSV.
• Work with Python instead of raw SPARQL queries.
• Integrate easily with notebooks, data pipelines and legal analytics workflows.

Use Cases

bulletin-fetcher can be used for:

• Legal analytics
• Public policy research
• Regulatory monitoring
• Reproducible studies based on legal acts
• Data collection pipelines

Quick Start

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install bulletin-fetcher

Basic Usage Example

Fetch acts for a publication date:

from bulletin.eurlex.api.client import EurlexBulletinClient

client = EurlexBulletinClient()
acts = client.get_acts( 
    date="2025-01-01",
    date_end="2025-03-31",
    title_contains="artificial intelligence",
    language="ENG"
)

print(f"Total acts: {len(acts)}")
if acts:
    first = acts[0]
    print(first.celex_uri)
    print(first.title)

Example scripts

The repository includes runnable scripts with examples of use of the library:

python scripts/run_eurlex.py

And also a Jupyter Notebook: scripts/run_eurlex.ipynb.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Contact

For any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to the author:

• Author: Diego González Suárez
• Email: [e-mail]

Acknowledgements

TODO: Add acknowledgements here.

Citation

If you use bulletin-fetcher in academic work, please cite the project.

A CITATION.cff file will be added in a future release.

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