This project requires me to:
- Download pdfs with public information of every voter in Chile located at http://www.servel.cl/padronAuditado.html. (link now disabled...)
- Convert pdfs into text documents
- Create a CSV file with the information for each voter in Chile
I did this by:
- Manually downloading the pdf files. There were about 300 pdfs. There was a pdf for each comuna in Chile. It was easier for me to download the pdfs manually than it was to create code to do it for me. I was really lucky. The infromation was in pdf format while I was working on this project. Now it seems you have to input the ruts for each individual voter at https://consulta.servel.cl/
- I used R to convert the pdfs to text files. The R package used to convert the pdfs to text provided a much cleaner conversion than its Ruby equivalent. However, the conversion was still pretty difficult to parse.
- I used Ruby to create the CSV file. Ruby is pretty awesome when it comes to working with strings.