Pull data from the World Bank API

[davidrpugh]

There already appears to be an excellent Python interface for the World Bank API called wbdata written by Oliver Sherouse. Currently outputs data into Pandas DataFrame, but would be nice to have country-year Panels instead.

[jseabold]

What is the issue here? I have a student (@deadjaguars) that may be interested in working on this, but I'm not sure about the scope of the proposal. Is the idea just to fold this project into pandas? If it's just to also return country-year panels, wouldn't this best be an issue for wbdata? It shouldn't be more than a few lines of code right?

FYI, another project I'm aware of is pyWDI, though I haven't done any comparison of API, functionality, etc.

Any ideas?

cc @vincentarelbundock @OliverSherouse

[jseabold]

I now see OliverSherouse/wbdata#1

[vincentarelbundock]

There's already a pull request that was accepted and merged into Pandas master. I'm sure the code could be improved; it's very very basic, but it returns data frames with a proper country-year MultiIndex.

PR details:

#2592

Relevant file:

https://github.com/pydata/pandas/blob/master/pandas/io/wb.py

[jseabold]

Thanks, Vincent. Good to know and have the cross-link here. I guess we can close this then?

[vincentarelbundock]

yes, i think so. paging @wesm

[OliverSherouse]

I'll toss out that wbdata now has the panels functionality that David was asking for; I think the patch Vincent mentioned is a sufficient subset of what that library does, though if people want more in pandas I'll certainly be happy to throw in some effort.

[wesm]

Fair to close. Any specific improvements pls make a pull request

[davidrpugh]

The idea was just to get some basic functionality for searching and grabbing data from the World Bank API into pandas.io. Looks like we now how basic functionality to build on...

[jreback]

closing as already in DataReader as of 0.12