Today we were challenged to web scrape the parliamentary rules database – we WERE NOT allowed to download the ready made raw data from the website, but to create our own raw dataset using Alteryx!

Web-scraping is not my strong point as it can involve ALOT of Regex. Therefore the first challenge I gave myself for today was to try to use as much Regex as possible (and if possible only Regex!) in the hope of improving!

Here is my finished Alteryx workflow:

The difficulty I had with this workflow was giving each clause within each law a different ID number – in the end I managed to accomplish this using a rather complex multirow formula!

For my dashboard I went with something a bit different this time around and decided to keep things quite minimalist. I decided to look at how laws passed in the House of Commons have changed during wartime. Here is the final result:

Over-all I’m pretty happy with the result!