parsimony-rba

Reserve Bank of Australia source for parsimony: statistical tables fetch and catalog enumeration.

Part of the parsimony-connectors monorepo. Distributed standalone on PyPI as parsimony-rba.

Connectors

Coverage

The catalog indexes ~4,672 series across RBA's nine statistical categories (Reserve Bank, banking & finance, credit cards, monetary aggregates, household & business finance, interest rates, exchange rates, economic activity, balance of payments), drawn from three publication formats RBA exposes as static files (it has no JSON/REST API):

• CSV index (/statistics/tables/) — ~3,958 current series (the bulk).
• Current XLSX-exclusive sheets — series published only in a workbook, never re-exported as CSV (today: the Bond Purchase Program). Detected by dynamic exclusivity, so a future XLSX-only sheet is picked up automatically.
• Legacy xls-hist binaries (/statistics/historical-data.html) — discontinued series that left the live CSVs.

The catalog code is compound ({table_id}#{series_id}) because RBA reuses series ids across related tables. Every catalogued series is fetchable — rba_fetch resolves the table_id to whichever format published it. The redundant *hist.xlsx long-history workbooks and the period-range archives are deliberately skipped (an audit confirmed they carry the same series ids as the current CSVs). Data is CC BY 4.0 — cite as "Source: Reserve Bank of Australia".

Install

pip install parsimony-rba

Pulls in a compatible parsimony automatically. Verify discovery:

python -c "from parsimony import discover; print([p.name for p in discover.iter_providers()])"

Configuration

No API key required — the RBA statistics site is public and keyless.

curl_cffi is a required runtime dependency (installed automatically). The RBA site (rba.gov.au) is fronted by Akamai bot-mitigation that TLS-fingerprint-blocks stock python-httpx (every request returns HTTP 403). parsimony-rba reaches the origin only via curl_cffi, which presents a real Chrome TLS handshake. Without it the connector is non-functional — this is why curl_cffi ships as a hard dependency rather than an optional extra.

rba_search reads its catalog snapshot from hf://parsimony-dev/rba by default; override with the PARSIMONY_RBA_CATALOG_URL env var or load(catalog_url=...).

Quick start

from parsimony_rba import CONNECTORS

result = CONNECTORS["rba_fetch"](table_id="f1-data")
print(result.raw.head())

For multi-plugin composition:

from parsimony import discover

connectors = discover.load_all()

Catalogs

rba_search runs semantic search over a published catalog snapshot (hf://parsimony-dev/rba by default; override with the PARSIMONY_RBA_CATALOG_URL env var or load(catalog_url=...)). The snapshot is built from enumerate_rba via scripts/build_catalog.py. No API key is required — RBA is a public, keyless data source.

Provider

• Homepage: https://www.rba.gov.au
• Statistical tables: https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/

License

See LICENSE.