These are helpers for general data cleaning and for some specific webby cleaning stuff.

Functions

• get(url): Make a get request for a url and cache it, or load it from a cache if it has already been downloaded.
• randomsleep(mean = 8, sd = 4): Sleep for a normal-random number of seconds.
• fromstring and HtmlElement: These are extended versions of the respective components of lxml.html that provide two extra functions:
  • HtmlElement.one_xpath: Select one node based on an xpath; return an error if multiple or no nodes match this xpath.
  • HtmlElement.one_cssselect Select one node based on a css selector; return an error if multiple or no nodes match this xpath.
• digits(text): Extract the digits from some text.
• cache(key, func): Look up the key in the cache. If it exists, load it from there. Otherwise, cache the output of the function and return it.
• read_csv: ?
• usps: ?
• dateparse: parse dates with dateutil, but raise exceptions if incomplete date.

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nosetests