Gobble is the client API for Open-Spending, an international platform to package, share and visualize budget data. Gobble does exactly the same thing as the packager interface, except programatically. It can be used both as python client or a command line interface. It's compatible with versions 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5. You can install it via pip.

pip install gobble

A generic Datapackage is a lightweight container for data. A Fiscal Data Package is a special type of data package for government budget and spending data. It's user-oriented and aims to be extremely easy to use, both for those publishing data (e.g. governments) and for those wanting to use the data (such as researchers and journalists).

Technically speaking, a fiscal datapackage consists of a JSON descriptor pointing to data files. The JSON descriptor needs to follow fiscal data specifications. A basic local fiscal data package could look like this:

/basepath/budget.json   
         /data/budget_2014.csv
               budget_2015.csv

Once your fiscal data package is ready, you can start using Gooble.

Asciinema to come...

In Gobble, fiscal data is represented by the FiscalDataPackage class. It's a sub-class of the DataPackage class, defined in the datapackage-py library. To create a FiscalDataPackage object, pass the path of your descriptor to the constructor:

budget = FiscalDataPackage('path/to/my/package/descriptor.json')

Note that as of today, Open-Spending only supports data files in CSV format, so FiscalDataPackage will raise a NotImplemented error if you try and pass it other formats.

To validate the fiscal datapackage descriptor schema:

bugdet.validate()

If the descriptor schema is invalid, a ValidationError will be raised. To get a list of errors instead, set the raise_error flag to False.

budget.validate(raise_error=False)

To upload a fiscal data package to Open-Spending:

url = budget.upload()  # the url of your new package on Open-Spending

By default, uploaded packages are private. You can toggle the publication state like so:

new_state = budget.toggle('public') # returns 'public'

You can search (and download) the descriptor file of existing fiscal data packages from the Open-Spending platform like so:

query = {'countryCode': 'MX'}
results = search(query)

where results is list of JSON package descriptors (as dict). Valid search keys are: size, title, author, description, regionCode, countryCode, cityCode. Or you can use the magic q key to search all fields at once.

You can limit search results and include you private packages in the results like so:

query = {'author': 'mickey_mouse'}
results = search(query, limit=5, private=True)

• Open-Spending web platform
• Open-Spending docs for developers
• datapackage-py package repository
• Fiscal Data Package homepage
• Open-Knowledge Foundation

Gobble is under MIT License.

We welcome feedback, issues and pull-requests. Please check out the contribution guidelines.