Votes scraping for TN bills

[Tim Lee]

Hey All,

Is there a reason why votes data for bills from TN not scrapped? Here is an example of a bill from the TN state legislative website: http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/default.aspx?BillNumber=HB0142&GA=109

Along the top is the 'votes' tab but when I access the votes object, the API returns no information on any of the bills I'm tracking for TN. Does anyone have any insight into why this is or how we can alter the API for TN to access this data?

Thanks so much!

[Tim Lee]

Hey Hey, bumping this in the hopes someone can help out or point me in the right direction to fix.

Thanks!

[Tim Showers]

Disclaimer: I'm a third-party contributor, not with OS.

There's currently no votes scraper in the openstates code for TN. 

Looking at the website source, those votes are a block of plain text that's inconsistently formatted, so writing an accurate scraper would be a challenge. If you'd like to try to tackle it, you can find the scraper code here - https://github.com/sunlightlabs/openstates in /openstates/openstates/TN/bills.py -- Look at other states save_vote() function calls for examples.

[Tim Lee]

Thanks, Tim!

That explains why there is no votes scraper for TN. I think I unfortunately can't tackle creating a good votes scrapper as I don't have any Python skills right now, but I appreciate the response. 

Thank you!