Lagasafn

This repository contains an unofficial copy of the Law Collection of Iceland.

A ZIP archive of the law collection is fetched, extracted and stored in the html/ folder.

An attempt is made to parse the .html files to .md files which are stored in the md/ folder.

Unfortunately the HTML structure is bad, to the point that parsing the content correctly to .md can be tricky.

What's the reason for this repository?

In my opinion the Alþingi lagasafn is in great need of more love and care. The Icelandic public has access to the lagasafn as a set of .html files whose HTML structure is very lacking. It is, in my opinion, hard to navigate through, hard to figure out in which chapter a given law resides, and near impossible to lookup changesets between versions without using some diff tool of your own.

I conclude this, our lagasafn and its underlying assembly is in great need for cleanup, I propose the following:

use git repository for version control
maintain set of markdown files instead of HTML files

Why markdown?

For the same reason most software documentation is written in markdown. It's minimalistic and contains only content with minimal structure and no styling. Plus it's easily parsable to structured HTML if needed.

You can read the lagasafn in markdown here.

Requirements

Python 3.8.2, pip and pip modules listed in requirements.txt.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

# runs the althingi lagasafn CLI
python lagasafn.py

Tests

# runs all tests
python runtests.py

Todo

Automate periodic law collection fetching, parsing and pushing to this repository
Parse law pages better
- detect content difference between file in html and md
- figure out how the md file should look like
- add parsing test for the file to folder test/expamples and file test/test_webparser.py
- fix parser code in lagasafn.py so all tests pass
Add CLI commands
Refactoring?
- split lagasafn.py file into smaller ones
- smarter parsing

Loknar / lagasafn