Bluebell

Bluebell is a (fairly) generic Akoma Ntoso 3 parser, supporting all hierarchical elements and multiple document types.

Bluebell supports these Akoma Ntoso (AKN) root document types:

• act, bill (hierarchicalStructure → <Act> / <Bill>)
• debateReport, doc, statement (openStructure → <DebateReport>, <Doc>, <Statement>)
• debate (debateStructure → <Debate>)
• judgment (judgmentStructure → <Judgment>)

Bluebell tries to walk the line between being expressive and supporting a range of AKN documents and structures, while being simple to use and not requiring that authors have an in-depth knowledge of AKN.

Bluebell will always produce structurally valid Akoma Ntoso, no matter what input is given. It will never refuse to parse malformed input. If it does, it's a bug.

Full documentation: https://laws.africa/bluebell/

Usage

See https://laws.africa/bluebell/ for installation, CLI usage, and grammar guides.

Quick start

Install from PyPI:

pip install bluebell-akn

From the commandline, parse an act in act.txt and output pretty XML:

bluebell /za/act/2020/1 act act.txt --pretty

From Python code, parse the same file:

from bluebell.parser import AkomaNtosoParser
from cobalt.uri import FrbrUri

frbr_uri = FrbrUri.parse("/akn/za/act/2009/1")
parser = AkomaNtosoParser(frbr_uri)
xml = parser.parse_to_xml("""
CHAPTER 1 - Heading

  SECTION 1 - Short title

    Some introductory text.

  SECTION 2

    This section has two items:

    ITEMS
      ITEM (a)
        Here is item (a) text.

      ITEM (B)
        Here is item (b) text.
""")
print(xml)

Development

1. We use a version of canopy from github, so clone it into the same directory as this directory: git clone https://github.com/jcoglan/canopy.git
2. Build canopy: cd canopy; npm install; make; cd ..
3. Build grammar changes with make, which runs our Makefile to compile the grammar
4. Run tests with: python -m unittest

Releasing a new version

1. Update the version by changing the __version__ variable in bluebell/__init__.py
2. Commit your changes and push to the master branch on GitHub
3. Create a release in GitHub and it will automatically be pushed to PyPi

License

Copyright 2020 Laws.Africa.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.