pyestat 0.2.0

Python client for the e-Stat API (Japanese government statistics portal) with structured outputs for LLMs and data scientists.

Structured, typed results from Japan's official statistics portal (e-Stat) — ready for LLMs and data scientists.

Why • Install • Usage • Writing rules • License

English • 日本語

Why another e-Stat library?

The e-Stat API returns JSON that is a thin re-encoding of the original XML: dimension codes hide under @-prefixed keys and the cell value under $, while the human-readable labels and units for those codes live in a separate CLASS_INF block you must join yourself. Logical errors arrive as HTTP 200 with a non-zero RESULT.STATUS. Existing Python wrappers stop at "give me a DataFrame" and pass these quirks through to the caller.

pyestat resolves them. With no per-table setup, each code comes back joined to its label and each value to its unit (the default, rule="auto"):

# e-Stat's raw VALUE cell: codes only — labels and units live in CLASS_INF
{"@cat01": "000", "@time": "2020000000", "$": "126146"}

# pyestat (rule="auto"): codes resolved to labels, value carries its unit
{"cat01": {"code": "000", "label": "男女計"},
 "time":  {"code": "2020000000", "label": "2020年",
           "normalized": "2020", "granularity": "yearly"},
 "value": {"value": "126146", "unit": "千人"}}

And where e-Stat splits one observation across rows — one row per measure — it folds them back into a single record, one column per measure:

# e-Stat: each measure on its own row, sharing the same time
{"@time": "2020000000", "@tab": "001", "$": "16"}                     # 数量
{"@time": "2020000000", "@tab": "002", "$": "35220", "@unit": "千円"}  # 金額

# pyestat (rule="auto"): one record, the measures pivoted into columns
{"time": {"code": "2020000000", "label": "2020年",
          "normalized": "2020", "granularity": "yearly"},
 "数量": {"value": "16",    "unit": None},
 "金額": {"value": "35220", "unit": "千円"}}

So an LLM agent or a researcher consumes a response without learning the e-Stat wire format, joining CLASS_INF by hand, reshaping rows, or special-casing the HTTP-200 error channel.

What you get

Find and fetch the table you need

• Search the catalog by keyword or code — list_stats (searchWord, statsCode, …).
• Look at a table's axes before you download it — get_meta_info.
• Fetch only the slice you need — select narrows a huge table server-side by item / region / period, so the consumer price index (~13M rows) returns the few hundred you asked for, keyed by the same axis ids get_meta_info shows.
• Pull a large table without loading it all into memory — iter_stats_data_pages yields one page at a time. Stop a runaway query before it downloads with max_rows (raises TooManyRowsError), and track a long pull with a progress callback.

Get back data you can use, not codes to decode

The default — rule="auto", no rule to write.

• Read 男女計, not 000 — every code arrives with its label, the CLASS_INF lookup already done.
• Sort and group on time directly — dates come back normalized with their granularity tagged (2020, yearly / monthly / …).
• Treat one observation as one row — when e-Stat spreads a measure across several rows, you get them back together, each measure in its own column to read across (GDP, CPI, housing starts, trade). A table pyestat can't structure yet comes back as plain raw rows, never an error.
• Keep only the figures you want to sum — aggregates="exclude" drops the subtotal and total rows, "only" keeps just the totals.

Hand off to your tools

• Get one column per field for pandas and friends — to_flat().

Hit a table pyestat doesn't fold yet, or want column names of your own? That is a short rule away — see Writing your own rules.

Throughout, the numbers are never rewritten: they stay strings, and e-Stat's suppression markers (- / *** / X) are preserved as-is. e-Stat's habit of reporting errors as HTTP 200 surfaces as a typed EstatApiError, and dropped connections are retried for you.

Status

pyestat is pre-1.0. Two parts of the surface move at different speeds:

• Settled — what you consume: the nested StatsDataResponse shape (with its to_flat() projection) and the EstatError hierarchy hold across 0.x.
• Evolving — what you author: the RuleV2 rule schema may still change across 0.x as built-in coverage grows.

Install

uv add pyestat
# or
pip install pyestat

Usage

Register for an appId at https://www.e-stat.go.jp/api/, then pass it explicitly to EstatClient(app_id=...). A common convention is to keep it in an ESTAT_APP_ID environment variable and read it yourself:

import os

from pyestat import EstatClient, EstatApiError

client = EstatClient(app_id=os.environ["ESTAT_APP_ID"])

try:
    response = client.get_stats_data(stats_data_id="0003448237")
except EstatApiError as exc:
    # e-Stat reports logical errors with HTTP 200 + STATUS != 0.
    print(f"e-Stat refused the query: {exc.status} {exc.message}")
else:
    print(response.stats_data_id)   # "0003448237"
    for row in response.values:
        # The default rule="auto" returns self-describing *nested* cells:
        # each axis is {code, label}, time adds normalized/granularity,
        # the observation is {value, unit}.
        print(row)
        # -> {"cat01": {"code": "000", "label": "男女計"},
        #     "time":  {"code": "2020000000", "label": "2020年",
        #               "normalized": "2020", "granularity": "yearly"},
        #     "value": {"value": "126146", "unit": "千人"}}

Prefer one column per field (e.g. for pandas)? to_flat() projects the nested cells to the familiar suffix shape — losslessly, and as a no-op on a raw (rule=None) response:

flat = response.to_flat()
# -> [{"cat01": "000", "cat01_label": "男女計",
#      "time": "2020", "time_code": "2020000000",
#      "time_label": "2020年", "time_granularity": "yearly",
#      "value": "126146", "unit": "千人"}, ...]

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame(flat)

Pass rule=None instead to get e-Stat's raw rows unchanged (@-prefixed dimensions become plain keys, "$" becomes "value") — flat scalars, no labels or normalization.

Fetching one slice of a large table

Some tables are too big to pull whole — the consumer price index is millions of rows across every item, region, and period. select filters server-side, keyed by the axis ids get_meta_info reports, so you fetch only the slice you want:

# 総合 (all items) × 全国 (nationwide) × 指数 (the index), annual rows only
resp = client.get_stats_data(
    "0003427113",  # 2020-base CPI — ~13M rows unfiltered
    select={"cat01": "0001", "area": "00000", "tab": "1", "time": {"level": "1"}},
)
# a few hundred rows, structured exactly as above — not the whole catalog

A select value is a code, a list of codes, or a mapping setting any of code / level (a single level or a range) / from / to (an inclusive code range) — each key optional, as the example's time: {"level": "1"} shows. The codes are e-Stat's own — pyestat passes them through as-is, with no catalog lookup, so a wrong code isn't flagged client-side; e-Stat just returns no rows for it. Read the codes off get_meta_info:

for axis in client.get_meta_info("0003427113").class_objs:
    print(axis.id, axis.name, len(axis.classes))  # axis id, name, member count

The result is an ordinary response — to_flat() it into pandas and take your analysis from there.

Writing your own rules

pyestat ships built-in rules for a small set of tables and falls back to rule="auto" for the rest. When you want different structuring — or domain-specific column names — supply your own RuleV2:

from pyestat import EstatClient, RuleV2

custom = RuleV2.model_validate({
    "schema_version": "2",
    "match": {"role_pattern": ["value", "area", "time"]},
    "output": [
        {"column": "year",   "source": {"role": "time"}, "transform": "yearly"},
        {"column": "region", "source": {"role": "area"}},
        {"column": "value",  "source": {"role": "value"}},
    ],
})

client = EstatClient(user_rules=[custom])

A rule declares the output columns you want, each drawn from an axis role the classifier infers, so one rule covers every table sharing that role pattern. Pivoting rows split across a meta-axis, naming columns for to_flat(), and dropping rule files into a directory are covered in Writing rules →.

The RuleV2 schema is evolving across 0.x — see Status.

Error behavior

On the default rule="auto" path, whether a rule failure reaches you turns on who authored the failing rule — fall back when it is pyestat's, surface when it is yours:

• A built-in rule that cannot apply degrades to lossless raw output instead of raising: its failure is internal and you cannot edit it, so preserved data beats a crash.
• A rule you supplied — an explicit rule=RuleV2(...), a user_rules= entry, or a file in ./pyestat_rules — that cannot apply raises a typed error so you can fix it and re-run.

So get_stats_data(id) on a table pyestat does not yet handle returns usable raw rows rather than failing, while a mistake in your own rule is reported.

Every pyestat error inherits from EstatError, so a coarse except EstatError catches them all; catch a leaf (EstatApiError, TooManyRowsError, …) when you want to act on one case.

Configuring the appId

Usage shows the basic convention — pass app_id explicitly, kept in an ESTAT_APP_ID variable. How that variable reaches the environment is your project's call; a few common patterns:

Shell export (interactive use):

export ESTAT_APP_ID="<your-app-id>"
python your_script.py

.env file + python-dotenv (local development, Jupyter):

echo 'ESTAT_APP_ID=<your-app-id>' > .env
# in your code (or notebook cell):

import os

from dotenv import load_dotenv
from pyestat import EstatClient

load_dotenv()
client = EstatClient(app_id=os.environ["ESTAT_APP_ID"])

Docker / Compose: pass -e ESTAT_APP_ID=... or set it under environment: in your compose file.

CI (GitHub Actions, etc.): store the appId as an encrypted secret and inject it as an env var in the workflow step.

Production: pull it from your secret manager (AWS Secrets Manager / GCP Secret Manager / HashiCorp Vault / ...) at startup and pass it to EstatClient(app_id=...).

pyestat deliberately avoids reading the environment or bundling a dotenv loader, so it does not constrain how you manage secrets.

Development

uv sync                              # install runtime + dev deps
cp .env.example .env                 # then fill in your ESTAT_APP_ID
uv run pytest                        # runs unit + live API tests
uv run pytest -m "not integration"   # unit only (no network)

The live integration test under tests/test_get_stats_data_integration.py auto-skips if ESTAT_APP_ID is not set, so the unit suite stays hermetic without extra flags.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.