RubyPx

Work with PC-Axis files using Ruby.

Motivation

The Spanish Statistics Institute (INE) favourite format to publish the data is PC-Axis, a semi-plain-text format which is kind of difficult to work with unless you have a PC with Windows installed in.

There is a library in R called pxR from @gilbellosta, but I don't know more alternatives in other programming languages.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem'ruby_px'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ruby_px

Usage

# Load a datasetdataset=RubyPx::Dataset.new'spec/fixtures/ine-padron-2014.px'# Query some metadatadataset.title=>"Población por sexo, municipios y edad (año a año)."dataset.units=>"personas"dataset.source=>"Instituto Nacional de Estadística"dataset.contact=>"INE E-mail:www.ine.es/infoine. Internet: www.ine.es. Tel: +34 91 583 91 00 Fax: +34 91 583 91 58"dataset.last_updated=>"05/10/99"# Really, INE?dataset.creation_date=>"20141201"# Obtain the headings and the stubsdataset.headings=>["edad (año a año)"]dataset.stubs=>["sexo","municipios"]# Obtain the dimensions of the datasetdataset.dimensions=>["sexo","edad (año a año)","municipios"]# Get the list of values of a dimensiondataset.dimension('sexo')=>["Ambos sexos","Hombres","Mujeres"]# Query the data using the method #data# You can query the data in two ways:# 1 - providing all the dimensions, so you'll obtain a single valuedataset.data('edad (año a año)'=>'Total','sexo'=>'Ambos sexos','municipios'=>'28079-Madrid')=>"3165235"# 2 - providing all the dimensions except one, so you'll obtain an arraydataset.data('edad (año a año)'=>'Total','sexo'=>'Ambos sexos')=>[....]# an array with the population of all places for all ages and both sexs

TODO

• Refactor
• Test the gem with more files
• Speed-up the parsing time

Development

After checking out the repository, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/PopulateTools/ruby_px. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Thanks

Thank you Xavier Badosa for inspiring me with json-stat.org and the API of the Javascript library json-stat.com.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.