openlexington/Lex_to_LIVES — pull request #6 by blakeshall (2014-01-16 17:37:06+00:00)
Title: First pass at xls to csv converter

So the Lexington Health department has changed the way the show health inspection scores. Gone is the massive HTML table. They now offer `.xls` and `.pdf` downloads! See (here)[http://lexingtonhealthdepartment.org/ProgramsServices/RestaurantInspections/FoodEstablishmentInspectionScores/tabid/235/Default.aspx]. Now the site is still bad and I'm not sure if we could always parse out the download link (looks like it changes with the date) but this prevents us from having to write a web scraper to get up to date data.

This is my first pass at a excel spreadsheet to csv converter. It looks like we will have to change the csv converter to work properly, but it may just be better to go straight from .xls to csv. This was mainly to get the excel data into something easier to use. It also takes about 4 Minutes for the script to churn through the Jan 2014 data.

Not sure if I'd want to merge this but wanted to make sure everyone could see it and have a better platform for comments.