On 19/02/13 16:46, Tim Regan wrote:
I want to plot a simple chart showing the age of MPs (say in five year buckets) and how they voted in the "Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill - 5 Feb 2013" in the UK Parliament. I can find the voting data on the publicwhip website (it's at the bottom of this page http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/division.php?date=2013-02-05&number=151&display =allpossible) but I would like to get it as a spreadsheet (or a database) and then programmatically grab MP's age from somewhere (e.g. by scraping their date-of-birth from their Guardian profile).
Given that the number of MPs is fixed and fairly small, and dates of birth don't change, why not just build a spreadsheet of MP ages manually? If you take 2 minutes to look up each MP, compiling the whole list will probably be less effort than working out how to scrape the information.
Even better, create a Google Form, connect it to a spreadsheet, and ask people to add a few MPs each. I'm sure people would be happy to help if you made the results freely available.
-- Paul Waring http://www.pwaring.com _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
