nungster / cong_scrape

scraping utilities for public bills with expiring provisions

Setup:

Note: These instructions are specific to systems that can run docker-compose. At the moment, this is limited to osx/linux machines. Additionally, these instructions are oriented towards use on a desktop system.

1. Install Docker.
2. Download the repo and navigate to its root in a shell
   • Technically, you only need the docker-compose.yml file. You can just download that and put it in a directory with a subdirectory called data
3. Make sure Docker is running and is accessible (i.e. run eval $(docker-machine env default))
4. ensure latest images are installed by running docker-compose pull
5. run docker-compose run --rm get_plaws
   • This pulls the list of public laws using the spider defined in ./plaw-scraper
6. Now, run docker-compose run --rm congress_scrape
   • This will download the public laws and place them in the folder ./data/data
   • It will take a long time. And it will re-run a number of times to ensure that it grabs every file requested.

What you get:

At the end of this, you will have the following:

trcook/cong_scrape root:
| ...
├── data
│   ├── active.csv
│   ├── cache
│   │   ├── 93
│   │   ├── 94
│   │   ...
│   │   ├── 113
│   │   └── 114
│   ├── data
│   │   ├── 93
│   │   ├── 94
│   │   ...
│   │   ├── 113
│   │   └── 114
│   ├── log
│   │   ├── RUN_1_NOTCAPTURED.log
│   │   ├── RUN_2_NOTCAPTURED.log
│   │   ...
│   │   ├── RUN_29_NOTCAPTURED.log
│   │   └── RUN_30_NOTCAPTURED.log
| ...

plaw2.csv and active.csv are safe to delete, but they will contain some useful information about lingering files that did not get downloaded.

You probably want to keep plaws.csv since that has the list of all public laws downloaded and the the corresponding bill numbers.

Ok. Now it's time to search

Searching

From your terminal (at the bash/shell prompt), at the repo root, call docker-compose run search_plaws './data' -o ./data/output.csv --regex='REGEX STRING' to generate search and matches.

 docker-compose run search_plaws './data' -o output.csv --regex="(extends(?:\s\w+){0,28}\sFY)"

matches FY after extends with as many as 28 words in between

A bunch of pre-compiled patterns are set in allpatterns.sh in shell (terminal) run:

./allpatterns.sh

This will generate a file, out.csv that contains provisions and law numbers.

You can also run the regex search directly using:

./plaw_scraper/billsearch/bills.py './data' -o ./data/output.csv --regex='REGEX STRING'

This might run a bit faster. but the search script is not really built for speed. It hits some major slowdown when multiple provisions are matched in a single bill using the same regex string. I might return to this at some point to fix it. but at the moment, it's a bit slow. If anyone has a good way of concatenating dictionaries, let me know.