Simple script I used to get make a map from ACS survey data variable names to their descriptive table names.

acs_tableid2name.py

#!bin/env/python 
# Simple script I used to get make a map from ACS
# survey data variable names to the descriptive table names.

# It made my life a bit easier when searching for table names 
# programmatically

# here is the ACS varibles site:
# http://api.census.gov/data/2014/acs5/variables.html

import os
import json
import subprocess
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

#replace with you desired location
HOME = os.expanduser(~/)
HTML_FILE = os.path.join(HOME, "variables.html")
MAP_HOME = os.path.join(HOME, "census_table_varible_map.json")


# we're going to to chunk the parsed html so that we get a
# a row of the html table per chunk. 5 its the number of cell 
# html table. See : http://api.census.gov/data/2014/acs5/variables.html

chunk_size = 5 

def chunker(l, n=5):
  for i, _ in enumerate(l):
    if i % n == 0:
      yield l[i:, i+n]

site = "http://api.census.gov/data/2014/acs5/variables.html"
# run wget file will be saved under "variables.html"
cmd = subprocess.check_output(["wget", site, "-o", HTML_FILE])
f = open(HTML_FILE, "r")
soup = BeautifulSoup(f.read(), "lxml")

# the the the table rows
tds = (td.text for td in soup.find_all("td"))
chunks = chunker(tds)

map = {}
# grab chunks of size 5
for c in chunks:
  map[c[0]] = {"col_name" : c[1], "table_name" : c[2]}

# write the map to disk
json.dump(map, open(MAP_HOME, "W"))

#done!