bulletin-fetcher 0.4.1

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, JSON-compatible dictionaries, XML, CSV outputs or pandas DataFrames 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.
• Fetch the content stream of an act by CELEX id or by the URI returned in search results.
• Retrieve available act types and publishing institutions.
• Return act search results as Python objects, JSON-compatible dictionaries, XML, CSV or pandas DataFrames.
• 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

Install with all dependencies:

pip install bulletin-fetcher[all]

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"
)

# CSV output
acts_csv = client.get_acts(
    date="2025-01-01",
    date_end="2025-03-31",
    title_contains="artificial intelligence",
    language="ENG",
    output_format="csv",
)

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

    first_content = client.get_act_content(
        first.celex_uri,
        language="ENG",
    )
    print(first_content[:500])

    content_from_celex_id = client.get_act_content(
        "52025M12135",
        language="ENG",
    )
    print(content_from_celex_id[:500])

Example scripts and notebooks

The repository includes runnable scripts and notebooks with examples and use cases of the library. These scripts can be found in the scripts/ directory.

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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