🚀 [Feature]: Query Norwegian law offline and parse the archives into objects

[Marius Storhaug (MariusStorhaug)]

Norwegian acts and central regulations are now reachable as PowerShell objects, offline and with no account. The module ships a bundled index of every openly published document's metadata, refreshed daily, and can parse a downloaded archive into a full object hierarchy, preserving chapter and paragraph structure, clauses, lists, footnotes, and change notes, with nothing dropped.

New: Search the whole corpus offline

Find-LovdataDocument searches the bundled index by title, short title, identifier, ministry, or legal area, and Get-LovdataDocument returns a document from the index with no network access. Get-LovdataLegalArea returns the legal-area taxonomy derived from the index.

New: Full-fidelity documents from an archive

Expand-LovdataPublicDataset unpacks a downloaded .tar.bz2 package, and Get-LovdataDocument -Path parses the extracted XML into a LovdataDocument with its complete body. A date field carrying two dates or a prose qualifier is exposed in full rather than truncated, and a legal area keeps its hierarchical path.

Technical Details

• Object model under src/classes/public/ derived from a scan of the live corpus.
• Class-keyed metadata parser, recursive body parser, and a date-field parser under src/functions/private/Parsing/.
• Deterministic per-source index JSON under src/, generated by the module's own parser, refreshed by scripts/Update-LovdataData.ps1 and a daily workflow.
• Implementation plan progress: tracks Section 3 of Represent the open archive corpus as PowerShell objects with a bundled, daily-updated index #18.

Note: the daily updater needs two GitHub App secrets provisioned: LOVDATA_UPDATER_BOT_CLIENT_ID and LOVDATA_UPDATER_BOT_PRIVATE_KEY.

Related issues

• Fixes Represent the open archive corpus as PowerShell objects with a bundled, daily-updated index #18
• Add an offline law index and archive-parsing commands over the open data packages #17

[github-actions]

Super-linter summary

Language	Validation result
CHECKOV	Pass ✅
GITHUB_ACTIONS	Pass ✅
GITLEAKS	Pass ✅
GIT_MERGE_CONFLICT_MARKERS	Pass ✅
JSON	Pass ✅
MARKDOWN	Pass ✅
NATURAL_LANGUAGE	Pass ✅
POWERSHELL	Pass ✅
PRE_COMMIT	Pass ✅
SPELL_CODESPELL	Pass ✅
TRIVY	Pass ✅
XML	Pass ✅
YAML	Pass ✅

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[Marius Storhaug (MariusStorhaug)]

Verified independently before merge, against the committed index rather than the parser tests.

Corpus-wide invariant across the bundled data: for every reference whose RefID embeds a date, does Date match that reference's own RefID? 1351 references checked, 0 mismatches. That is the exact property the defect violated, asserted over the whole shipped dataset rather than one fixture.

Independent spot-check against published text: veglova's record is RefID lov/2024-12-06-74, Date 2024-12-06, InForceFrom 2025-01-01. A separately hand-written rendering of that law, produced by a person reading Lovdata, states Sist endret | LOV-2024-12-06-74 fra 01.01.2025. They agree, and that source is genuinely independent of this parser. InForceFrom is populated on 479 documents, so the new field carries real data rather than sitting null.

ChangesToDocuments shares the same reference parser and is covered by the same check. It never showed the visible symptom, because those fields are bare RefID lists with no free-text date for the previous code to latch onto, so the field-wide date it computed usually coincided with the correct answer. Same latent defect, masked by the data; fixed by the same change and now proven rather than assumed. eeaReferences and appliesTo use the plain-text path and were never affected.

The regression test asserts per reference including the negative case, so it fails against the previous parser rather than merely passing against the new one.

First-query cost is deferred to #21 as a measured, non-blocking characteristic.