Practical Business Python

Taking care of business, one python script at a time

Tue 06 January 2015

Web Scraping - It’s Your Civic Duty

Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles   

More and more information from local, state and federal governments is being placed on the web. However, a lot of the data is not presented in a way that is easy to download and manipulate. I think it is an important civic duty for us all to be aware of how government money is spent. Having the data in a more accessible format is a first step in that process.

In this article, I’ll use BeautifulSoup to scrape some data from the Minnesota 2014 Capital Budget. Then I’ll load the data into a pandas DataFrame and create a simple plot showing where the money is going.

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