March 17th, 2005 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, IRE, Python
Some references from the Advanced day of the NICAR conference: my list of open-source applications and my Python script for grabbing a list of FEC electronic filings (shown by Ron Nixon).
February 11th, 2005 | by Derek | published in Python
Just fixed my Python script that produces a pipe-delimited list of political party committee electronic filings with the Federal Election Commission. The update was needed because the FEC site changed the URL where it stores the filings.
January 15th, 2005 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, Python
Got a DBF file and want to use Python to access it (a distinct possibility if you’re working on a Mac)? Try this new recipe by Raymond Hettinger from the Python Cookbook. DBF reader and writer can both iterate through existing DBF files and write data out to DBFs.
December 23rd, 2004 | by Derek | published in Python
Played around a bit last night with SnakeSQL, a pure-Python SQL database that since its initial release in November has grown to support simple joins and foreign keys, in addition to being ANSI SQL 92 and DB-API 2.0 compliant. For those times when you don’t have (or need) MySQL, SQL Server or another third-party database [...]
November 6th, 2004 | by Derek | published in Fed Data, Python
Good scripting happens, I’ve found, when a task proves so repetitive that it motivates you to make sure that you don’t have to do it ever again. Hence this new Python script I’m releasing that takes a list of FEC electronic filings and spits out two files containing each type of expenditure (known among campaign [...]