Cranson

A lightweight parser for Irish planning applicatons. Currently supports parsing applications for the following authorities.

Fingal (dataset)
Dublin City Council (dataset)

The endgoal here is to provide a better way of retrieving and searching for planning applications. The current offering is clunky and awkward.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'cranson'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install cranson

Usage

The parser implements the Observer pattern, and you should subscribe using a class that responds to an update method.

class Observer

  # this method will be invoked with a
  # planning application object when one
  # has been parsed
  def update(planning_app)
    p planning_app
  end
end

Fingal applications are stored in XML format and parsed using a sax parser.
Usage:

fingal_document = Cranson::Parsers::Fingal.new              # instantiate the document parser
fingal_document.add_observer(Observer.new)                  # and then add your observer
fingal_parser = Nokogiri::XML::SAX::Parser.new(document)    # instantiate the sax parser
fingal_parser.parse(File.open("./input/fingal_1216.xml"))   # parse the file

Dublin City Council applications are stored in CSV format and parsed by iterating over rows.
Usage:

dcc_parser = Cranson::Parsers::Dcc.new                      # instantiate the document parser
dcc_parser.add_observer(Observer.new)                       # and then add your observer
dcc_parser.parse(File.open("./input/dcc_0218.csv"))         # parse the file

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/gary-rafferty/cranson

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

gary-rafferty / cranson