statute-utils

statute-utils recognizes Philippine statutory citations, resolves them to canonical corpus records, builds searchable SQLite artifacts from legal YAML trees, and renders those trees as reusable HTML.

Python 3.14 or newer is required.

uv add statute-utils

Extract a citation

Use extract_rules() when a category and serial number are enough. Use extract_rule_matches() with a statute catalog when a database relationship needs an unambiguous corpus ID.

from statute_utils import StatuteCatalog, extract_rule_matches, extract_rules

rules = list(extract_rules("Republic Act Nos. 386 and 7160"))

catalog = StatuteCatalog.open("data/main.db")
match = next(extract_rule_matches("1987 Constitution", catalog=catalog))
assert match.statute_id == "const-1987-1987-02-02-1"

Catalogs are immutable in-memory snapshots. Candidate lookup performs no later SQLite reads, and each snapshot exposes a logical fingerprint that identifies the statute metadata used for resolution.

Build the SQLite artifact

The canonical build stages and validates all package-owned tables and views before atomically replacing the target. A failed build leaves the previous database untouched. Higher-level artifact builders can call statute_utils.rebuild.build_trees_into() when they already own the staging connection and publication boundary.

builder rebuild-trees \
  --db-name data/main.db \
  --statutes-folder ../corpus-statutes \
  --codifications-folder ../corpus-codifications

The configured Just wrapper accepts the same options:

just build-trees --db-name data/main.db

Documentation

• Overview
• Release notes
• Extract citations
• Use catalog snapshots
• Fetch statutes
• Build SQLite artifacts
• Render legal trees
• Python API

For repository work, run just check to execute the tests, strict documentation build, and package build.