Simple scripts to work with FRED Data

pullfred.py is a simple script that can be run from the command to download data from FRED in either XML (default) or JSON formats supproted by the FRED API. The script requires python 3.

The minimal function call is python3 pullfred.py <series name> <api_key>. The script defines and calls a single function download_fred. The script will by default attempt to download an XML file with the data for the FRED series <series name> and save it as <series name>.xml.

The function call itself can be edited in the script to change the date range pulled, the units, the frequency, the aggreation method, and the file type downloaded. If none of these are specified then the script downloads the exact data that you would have gotten if you had gone to the FRED website and searched for the series name and openened the default series which is usually the highest frequency series available. If the user changes the file_type argument to json, then a JSON file will be downloaded and the output file will have a .json suffix in place of a .xml suffix.

api keys can be accessed from the FRED website.

read_fred.jl contains a function that can be used to read in XML data from FRED that is downloaded by pullfred.pdsa. XML file is read in as a DataFrame object

The julia code has some dependencies that can be automatically loaded by using Pkg