Parliamentarian

Description

Download and parse the current list of members of parliament, and their contact details, from the parliaments which publish one as a CSV.

Two are covered so far: the federal parliament of Australia, and the parliament of the State of Victoria. Each chamber is a method, and each row comes back as an object whose attributes are the column headings underscored, so a CSV which gains a column gains an attribute without anything here being changed.

Installation

0. Have a recent version of Ruby installed

1. Via RubyGems

$ gem install parliamentarian

Or in a Gemfile:

gem 'parliamentarian'

Usage

Australia, federally

require 'parliamentarian'

Parliamentarian::Australia::Federal.senators
# => [#<Parliamentarian::Australia::Federal>, ...], the Senate

Parliamentarian::Australia::Federal.members
# => [#<Parliamentarian::Australia::Federal>, ...], the House of Representatives

Parliamentarian::Australia::Federal.all
# => both chambers together

Victoria

Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.legislative_councillors
# => [#<Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria>, ...], the upper house

Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.legislative_assemblymembers
# => [#<Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria>, ...], the lower house

Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.all
# => both houses together

A member

The attributes are the CSV's own column headings, underscored:

member = Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.legislative_councillors.first

member.last_name        # => "Smith"
member.preferred_name   # => "Jane"
member.electorate       # => "Southern Metropolitan"
member.party            # => "Australian Labor Party"
member.eo_postcode      # => "3000", taken from the electorate office address

first_name, firstname, lastname and surname are aliases, the two parliaments not agreeing on which of them to publish.

Reading from a file rather than the web

Each method takes a path, which is what the tests use and what a cached copy wants:

Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.legislative_councillors('councilmembers.csv')
Parliamentarian::Australia::Victoria.all('councilmembers.csv', 'assemblymembers.csv')

A path is read from disk and anything with an http or https scheme is fetched, so the same method serves both.

Contributing

Fork it: https://github.com/thoran/parliamentarian/fork
Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
Create a new pull request

License

MIT