Providence Open Info

[Allan T.]

Providence is slowly opening up their data, with feeds for public
notices and meetings on ProvidenceRI.com. I also noticed a new site
http://ProvidenceSunshine.com that contains tax adjustments which were
not previously published anywhere. The site has no feed or export
functionality, and no link by Plat/Lot to the property database, so it
makes for interesting mashup material as this could be piped pretty
easily into the tax assessors DB, Providence Plan, and Google Maps.

[Peter Landry]

As an excuse to start learning BeautifulSoup, I whipped together some
python to extract that data. Enjoy!

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2

page = urllib2.urlopen("http://providencesunshine.com/")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

# map cell index to a property name
cell_mapping = {0: 'date', 1: 'plat_lot', 2: 'taxpayer', 3: 'amount',
4: 'notes'}

# the data table has no id, so search based on attributes
table = soup.find('table', border='1', width="95%")

if not table:
raise Exception('The HTML structure appears to have changed. I can
\'t figure it out.')
else:
rows = []
# skip the first row with headers
for row in table.findAll('tr')[1:]:
cell_index = 0
this_row = {}
for cell in row.findAll('td'):
this_row[cell_mapping[cell_index]] = cell.find
('font').contents
cell_index += 1
rows.append(this_row)

print rows

On May 23, 1:43 pm, "Allan T." <akt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Providence is slowly opening up their data, with feeds for public

> notices and meetings on ProvidenceRI.com. I also noticed a new sitehttp://ProvidenceSunshine.comthat contains tax adjustments which were

[Allan Tear]

Wow, Peter, cool ! We'll check it out.

> > notices and meetings on ProvidenceRI.com. I also noticed a new sitehttp://ProvidenceSunshine.comthatcontains tax adjustments which were