Matricula Online Scraper

⚠️ This tool is still under development and is NOT yet feature-complete. Expect breaking changes and bugs. Please report any issues.

Matricula Online is a website that hosts parish registers from various regions across Europe. This CLI tool allows you to fetch data from it and save the data to a file.

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Our GitHub Workflow automatically scrapes a list with all parishes once a week and pushes to cache/parishes. Download parishes.csv ⚡️

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Note that this tool will not format or clean the data in any way. Instead, the data is saved as-is to a file. I mention this because the original data is especially poorly formatted and contains a lot of inconsistencies. It is up to the user to process the data further.

🔧 Installation

Make sure to have a recent version of Python installed. You can then install this script via pip:

$ pip install --user matricula-online-scraper

Nevertheless, you can clone this repository and run the script with Poetry.

💡 How To Use

$ matricula-online-scraper --help

prints available commands and options, including documentation. Same goes for each subcommand, e.g. matricula-online-scraper fetch --help.

The fetch command is the primary command to fetch any resources from Matricula Online. Its subcommands allow you to scrape different resources, run matricula-online-scraper fetch --help to see available subcommands.

Example 1:

Fetch all available locations and save them to a .jsonl file:

$ matricula-online-scraper fetch locations ./output.jsonl

⚠️ This will fetch all parishes from Matricula Online, which may take a few minutes. Despite that, this data only changes rarely, but frequent scraping will put unnecessary load on the server. Therefore our GitHub Workflow caches this data once a week and pushes to cache/parishes. ⚡️ Download CSV ⚡️

Example 2:

Fetch all available register from one parish in Münster, Germany and save them to a .jsonl file:

$ matricula-online-scraper fetch parish ./output.jsonl --urls https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/muenster/muenster-st-martini/

License & Contributing

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request if you have suggestions, especially bug fixes. Please make sure to follow the Contributing Guidelines.