Utah {Generic} Statutes Document Generator

There are lots of statutes at le.utah.gov that pertain to firearms: ownership, selling, buying, carrying, defensive use, etc. Sometimes you might (I do, anyway) want to have just the firearms-related statutes available offline. This program aims to accomplish that.

And in it's latest version, it is now a more generic html booklet maker for subsets of Utah code. Or, a specialized le.utah.gov scraper.

This latest version simplifies the settings file format, and includes one for most bicycle-related statutes.

Current

This is a standalone nim program that's primary purpose is to download the latest version of statute sections (chapter, parts, sections, or subsections) that relate to firearms, and optionally transform them.

It is configured with the settings .json file. Allowed values for the download_format are:

xml
rtf
pdf

The only supported output_format is html. The output_format will be ignored unless the download_format is xml.

When download_format is xml and output_formatis html a single html page will be generated containing all the statues, and a linked table of contents. The xml files and the generated html file are saved in the cwd where the program is run.

Two new required settings are title for the html title element and initial H1, and filename for the destination html file.

Building

To build from source:

git clone https://gitlab.com/manithree/utfastatutes.git
cd utfastatutes
nimble build

Then to run it, just:

./utfastatutes_nim settings.json

History

I originally wrote a groovy script that downloaded the .rtf files from le.utah.gov and used libreoffice and OoOPy to put it all together in one document. I discovered later that I hadn't properly reverse engineered le.utah.gov and it didn't always download the latest versions. It also didn't have a table of contents.

So, I re-wrote it in rust, and fixed it so it that it always got the latest version of the statute. I couldn't find a good ODF library in rust, but there's a really good Java one, so I wrote another groovy script to take xml files downloaded by the rust program and generate a libreoffice document with a table of contents.

The next step was writing a groovy script to convert the xml to very simple html with a table of contents. Then you don't need google doc/drive to view the document, and you don't need any libreoffice tools at document generation time.

All that happened over the last several years on github.

This is a re-write in Nim (yeah, this project is my excuse to learn a new language occasionally), and combine the download and html generation into one package. I strongly prefer the html output, so I didn't include the ODF output in the nim re-write. The latest version will download any format you configure it for, but will only generate HTML (and only from XML).

This is a fake change just for pijul.