textcavator-readers 0.5.0

Utilities for extracting XML, HTML, CSV, and other data types with a common interface

Textcavator Readers

textcavator-readers is a python module to extract data from a variety of formats, including CSV, XML, HTML, XLSX, JSON, and RDF.

This module was originally created for Textcavator, a web application that extracts data from a variety of datasets, indexes them and presents a search interface. To do this, we wanted a way to extract data from source files without having to write a new script "from scratch" for each dataset, and an API that would work the same regardless of the source file type.

The basic usage is that you will use the utilities in this package to create a "reader" class. You specify what your data looks like, and then call the documents() method of the reader to get an iterator of documents - where each document is a flat dictionary of key/value pairs.

Prerequisites

Requires Python 3.10 or later.

Contents

textcavator_readers contains the source code for the package. tests contains unit tests.

When to use this package

This package is not a replacement for more general-purpose libraries like csv or Beautiful Soup - it is a high-level interface on top of those libraries.

Our primary use for this package is to pre-process data for Textcavator, but you may find other uses for it.

Using this package makes sense if you want to extract data in the shape that it is designed for (i.e., a list of flat dictionaries).

What we find especially useful is that all subclasses of Reader have the same interface - regardless of whether they are processing CSV, JSON, XML, HTML, RDF or XLSX data. That common interface is crucial in an application that needs to process corpora from different source types, like Textcavator.

Usage

Typical usage of this package would be to make a custom Python class for a dataset from which you want to extract a list of documents. We call this a Reader. This package provides the base classes to structure readers, and provides extraction utilities for several file types.

For detailed usage documention and examples, visit textcavator-readers.readthedocs.io

If this site is unavailable, you can also generate the documentation site locally; see the contributing guide for insttructions.

Licence

This code is shared under an MIT licence. See LICENSE for more information.