Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Let’s Use Pandas & Requests to Grab UK Bank Holidays Dates with the gov.uk API

So, you have a custom internal calendar and someone forgot to add in bank holidays? or you noticed a spike in sales, an increase in web traffic and want to know if that date coincided with any key dates in the UK.

Well, thanks to a free government API we can easily grab this data in a JSON format and turn it into a nice looking pandas DataFrame.

Let's do that.

This will return a nested JSON like below:

print(python_dict)
{'england-and-wales': {'division': 'england-and-wales', 'events': [{'title': 'New Year’s Day', 'date': '2015-01-01', 'notes': '', 'bunting': True}, {'title': 'Good Friday', 'date': '2015-04-03', 'notes': '', 'bunting': False}, {'title': 'Easter Monday', 'date': '2015-04-06', 'notes': '', 'bunting': True},....

Now that we have the JSON safely nested inside a python dictionary type, lets loop over the relevant keys and add them to a new DataFrame.

which gives us a nice tabular DataFrame.

print(bank_hols.head(5))
title        date notes  bunting            Country
0          New Year’s Day  2015-01-01           True  england-and-wales
1             Good Friday  2015-04-03          False  england-and-wales
2           Easter Monday  2015-04-06           True  england-and-wales
3  Early May bank holiday  2015-05-04           True  england-and-wales
4     Spring bank holiday  2015-05-25           True  england-and-wales

We can then export the DataFrame to an Excel workbook or a CSV file (Comma Separated Values).

As a final test, let's find the last Scottish Bank Holiday & the next one.

we will first need to convert our date column into a proper DateTime column we can then use a simple formula

#current date = 22/12/2019
title      St Andrew’s Day 
date            2019-12-02
notes       Substitute day
bunting               True
Country           scotland
Name: 98, dtype: object
title      Christmas Day
date          2019-12-25
notes                   
bunting             True
Country         scotland
Name: 99, dtype: object

A few things to note, the data only goes far back as 2015 and the max date is the 28th of December 2021, you can read more about the Government APIs here: https://www.gov.uk/help/reuse-govuk-content

Full repo here

Happy Analysing!