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How to Query SEC Litigation API and Save Results into Pandas Dataframe: Python

How to Query SEC Litigation API and Save Results into Pandas Dataframe: Python

The SEC Litigation API Endpoint

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hosts a public API that allows the general public to query information from EDGAR (not covered here) and also hosts an API for information related to litigation (lawsuits) filings. We are going to show you how to query their live litigation, RSS feed, which returns results in XML and format them into a Pandas Dataframe in Python. The official litigation release page is browsable; but only includes the Release Number, Date, and Respondents to filing. Using their RSS feed that returns XML, we will have these columns in our dataframe: Title (respondents), HTML Link, Description and Release Date. The will take our XML result from RSS feed, then convert to json and load the json dictionary to a dataframe. Once the data fits the Pandas Dataframe, it is very easy to save as a CSV file or to SQLite database. In our example, we will save the results to CSV.

Our example is a short 25 lines of code. In order to make our life easier, we will use an external library called xmltodict; Pandas, requests, and json python libraries. Of course, we comment every single line of code in order for your benefit and understanding. Resulting file should look like the below:



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