Parsing the FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations)

[zachheine]

I am trying to parse the Federal Aviation Regulations (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/CFR/2014/title-14) and have downloaded the XML. I am a bit confused as to what arguments I should pass following "python build_from.py". Any help appreciated.

[ascott1]

Awesome @zachheine.

I'll try to break it apart. I think these are correct, but I'm hoping that @cmc333333 or @khandelwal can jump in to verify or correct me (since they actually wrote the software).

python build_from.py regulation.ext title notice_doc_# act_title act_section

regulation.ext is the first xml file to build from
title is the title number. In the case of cfpb regs this is always 12.
notice_doc_# is the notice number for the first parsed notice
act_title is the title of the regulation's act, this is a number
act_section is the title of the act's section and is also a number

To give a few exmaples, here's what I would run to parse cfpb's reg e:

python build_from.py fr-notices/articles/xml/201/131/725.xml 12 2011-31725 15 1693

And reg z:

python build_from.py fr-notices/annual/CFR-2012-title12-vol8-part1026.xml 12 2011-31715 15 1601

[cmc333333]

@ascott1 's right, but I'll try to give a bit more context.

The parser works by taking a provided XML file (regulation.ext) as a starting point for the whole of a regulation's history. The third parameter (notice_doc_#) then identifies the version of the regulation that document should be associated with. The parser will then try to incorporate additional changes that have been made since that version was released -- not a particularly useful feature on your first try.

For your use case, I'd suggest the following:

1. Go to http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collectionCfr.action?selectedYearFrom=2014&go=Go, expand title 14, and select a CFR Part to work on, say part 11.
2. Download the XML file associated with that whole part (e.g. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2014-title14-vol1/xml/CFR-2014-title14-vol1-part11.xml)
3. Next, we need to know which version identifier to associate with this document. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/ and find the latest rule affecting 14 CFR 11 (or what have you). A quick search indicated this was 2014-04902 (though there's some technicalities that we'd want to verify -- the annual addition is a delayed release; it may not have included 2014-04902)
4. The final two numeric parameters aren't very important for a first pass, so we can give them dummy values. We'll also want to avoid building the "history" with this first pass -- we just want to get it to run. This means we can execute the parser with python build_from.py CFR-2014-title14-vol1-part11.xml 14 2014-04902 00 0000 false

There will no doubt be errors, so let us know what you run in to. If all goes well (fingers crossed), you'll have output json files in the regulation, layer, and notice directories. When you want to dive deeper, https://github.com/cfpb/regulations-parser#additional-details provides some more high-level info.