Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

kind of curious as to how this got generated in the first place

The full civil code text applicable for every date since at least 1817 is available at Legifrance.gouv.fr[1] so I suppose he just wrote a parser to transform each of these pages into plaintext, another one to get a list of all amendments, and commited each different version.

[1]http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEX...

Same here. Diffs published from the Journal Officiel aren't so easy to parse. I am afraid it could be manually generated, which is a dead end.

The author mention he did it in an afternoon of code, so it's definitely not manually generated : "Voici un petit hack, résultat d'une après-midi de code"

I do agree that the technical details would be interesting.

I don't think it's possible to generate a general parser for the Journal Officiel in an afternoon.

It would make the author a _very_ efficient worker.

It's probably possible to do that for a crawler of http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr though.

He said in another comment that it's not how he did it.

Me too.

Unfortunately, the author was utterly careless about spelling. That really makes it feel like a quick hack.

The author specifically flags it as a quick hack:

> Voici un petit hack, résultat d'une après-midi de code : le code civil sous Git.

"Here is a quick hack, the result of an afternoon of coding: the civil code under Git."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com