The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database provides a tool to download the data. By default, that output is an .rtf rich-text file — not so easy to analyze with your favorite spreadsheet or statistics software. Luckily, getting a CSV of the data isn't very difficult. Here's how.
To get all transfers for 2014, by seller, run this command in your terminal:
curl http://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/html/export_trade_register.php --compressed \
--data 'low_year=2014' \
--data 'high_year=2014' \
--data 'seller_country_code=' \
--data 'buyer_country_code=' \
--data 'armament_category_id=any' \
--data 'buyers_or_sellers=sellers' \
--data 'filetype=csv' \
--data 'include_open_deals=on' \
--data 'sum_deliveries=on' \
--data 'Submit4=Download' \
> sipri-arms-by-seller-2014.csv- To adjust the timespan, change the
low_yearand/orhigh_yearvariables. E.g.,'low_year=2010'. - To get data only for specific countries, add their three-letter codes to the
seller_country_codeand/orbuyer_country_codevariables, with each country code separated by a space. E.g., focus on U.S. and Canadian sales, use'seller_country_code=USA CAN'.
Hi @jsvine, thanks for your reply. I realized that your code runs on Linux (I'm using Windows). I figured out how to do the same using Request in Python. However, the columns I got were 'tidn', 'buyercod', 'sellercod', 'odat', 'odai', 'onum', 'onai', 'ldat', 'term', 'desig2', 'wcat', 'desc', 'coprod', 'nrdel', 'nrdelai', 'delyears', 'buyer', 'seller', 'status', 'tivunit', 'tivorder', 'tivdel'.
Did you encounter this problem? How to get the columns' full names and units?