JSON Data Goodness on the new ONS (Office for National Statistics) Website

Via the @ONSDigital blog (http://blog.ons.digital/2016/02/25/new-ons-website-launched/, it seems that the new Office for National Statistics website, which publishes the UK’s official government statistics, has just been released in all its glory.

One thing I noticed was that it’s now trivial to get hold of data, in JSON format, from a statistics page by adding /data to the end of a stats page URL.

For example, the data behind the Consumer Price Index page:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/d7g7

can be found at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/d7g7/data

Data can also be downloaded in CSV and XLS formats using another derivable URL. For example, to download the data as CSV:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/generator?format=csv&uri=/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/d7g7

Use the value xls rather than csv to get the spreadsheet file.

Another nice feature is that the alphabetic listing of statistics:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/atoz?az=a

can also be accessed in a JSON data format by adding the /data path element:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/atoz/data?az=a

(Paged) search results can also be returned in JSON format:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/search/data?q=unemployment&page=12

Search results can also be narrowed down (following the tabs on the search results HTML page) from All to Data or Publications:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/searchdata/data?q=unemployment

http://www.ons.gov.uk/searchpublication/data?q=unemployment

It’s also possible to get time series charts as image URLs of the form:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/lf24/linechartimage?series=&fromMonth=01&fromYear=1971&toMonth=12&toYear=2015&frequency=months

(The date range filters don’t seem to work if applied to the /data URLs?)

Now I just need some time to play!

PS I’ve just popped a gist containing some python code that represents a first start at grabbing the data from the JSON feeds here: https://gist.github.com/psychemedia/ca7b981f2bbd45377b44