A Python script to parse Senate votes, by Aaron Swartz, 2005. Thank you, and may you find peace.

senate.py

#Module to retrieve and parse votes from Senate web site, output to stdout

import urllib, re


f=open('senate03.txt','w')


sr = re.compile('<question>(.*?)</td>.*?<b> Vote Date: </b><.*?>(.*?)</td>.*?<b> Required For Majority: </b><td class="contenttext">(.*?)</td></td><td valign="top" class="contenttext"><b> Vote Result: </b><.*?>(.*?)</td></td>', re.S)
sr2 = re.compile('</span>\n<TABLE width="100%"(.*?)</TABLE>', re.S)
sr3 = re.compile('\s+(?:<br>)?\s*(?:</TD><TD class="contenttext" width="33%">|<td width="33%" class="contenttext">)?(.*?), <b>(.*?)</b>')

def parseSenateVote(congress, session, n):
  sn = str(n).zfill(5)	
	c = urllib.urlopen("http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=" + `congress` + "&session=" + `session` + "&vote=" + sn).read()
	question, date, required, result = sr.findall(c)[0]
	question = question.replace("</question>", '').replace("\n", ' ').strip()
	print question, date, required, result
	
	c2 = sr2.findall(c)[0]
	
	nsum = 0
	for (name, vote) in sr3.findall(c2):
		print name, vote
		nsum += 1
	if nsum != 100: print "ERR: only", nsum, "votes!"
	
#Example: parseSenateVote(101, 1, 312)