py-bill-utils

Python project for analyzing U.S. legislative bills. Incorporates high-performance Zig utils for speedy processing.

Zig-Enhanced Python Project

This project integrates Zig executables for quickly analyzing U.S. legislative bills. This project uses six Zig CLI tools:

Tool	Description
`clean_bill`	Cleans bill text (removes line numbers, whitespace)
`extract_amendments`	Extracts amendments
`extract_headings`	Extracts section headers (`TITLE`, `SEC.`)
`extract_money`	Extracts funding amounts (e.g., `$5,000,000`)
`filter_keywords`	Filters lines by keyword (listed in keywords.txt)
`split_sections`	Splits full bill into files by section

Add Bill Data

Research bills:

Congress.gov
- 2025-hconres0014

Create a data/billname folder (e.g. data/2025-hconres0014/) and using the website, add:

bill.txt - paste the TXT version of the bill
amendments.csv - paste this from the Congress.gov site
keywords.txt - list keywords for that bill (and amendments)

Development: Python Workflow

See pro-analytics-01 for recommended workflow for a professional Python project.

Development: Python Dependencies

Create virtual environment (modify if not using Windows PowerShell):

py -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\activate
py -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
py -m pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt --timeout 100

Development: Zig Dependencies

List required Zig executables in requirements-zig.txt. Install them into zig-out with:

py zig-install-requirements.py

Generate Bill Output Files

Copy these two files from zig-bill-utils:

zig-bill-utils-run.ps1
zig-version.txt

Run pipeline on each data/billname folder in this repo:

./zig-bill-utils-run.ps1

README