Synopsis

These scripts written in Python are meant to:

• Download the pdf files for NHA-MBS circulars.
• Convert said pdf files to csv files.
• Contain functions that extract useful information from these files.

These scripts assume that a scraper/spider has already gathered all the links to the pdf files. These links have been saved in the folder:

~/pynha_scraper

For each issuer, the corresponding txt file in this folder contains the links to its circulars.

Once dowloaded, the pdf are saved in the folder:

~/pynha_scraper/pdf_downloaded

Requirements

With Python 2.7, you need:

• pandas >= 0.9.0
• pdfminer >= 20140328

The rest comes from the standard libraries (itertools, csv, collections, functools, etc). This is to minimize external dependencies.

Usage

To download NHA-MBS circulars (pdf) and save as files, run:

python downloadIssuersPdf.py

To convert pdf files to csv, run:

python convertToCsv.py

Motivation

Create a dataset for NHA-MBS (Mortgage-backed securities insured by the Canadian Governement) from the circulars.