pollster

Pollster - the Ruby gem for the Pollster API

Download election-related polling data from Pollster.

HuffPost Pollster is a website that tracks public opinion. Pollster's editors enter polling data for the \"Questions\" they care about -- questions the public answers in \"Polls\".

The Pollster website is organized into \"Charts\" and Pollster-calculated trendlines (descriptions of how the public felt each day, based on the polls and public algorithms). Each Chart is based on a single Question. The Pollster API provides every point plotted on all the \"Charts\" on the Pollster website. Furthermore, it provides the raw polling data that went into those charts: every response to every Question, at whichever level of detail the developer requests.

This SDK was originally generated by the Swagger Codegen project:

API version: 2.0.0
Package version: 2.0.0
Build package: class io.swagger.codegen.languages.RubyClientCodegen

For more information, please visit https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pollster-users

Installation

In short: add gem 'pollster', '~> 2.0.0' to your Gemfile.

Full installation options:

Build a gem

To build the Ruby code into a gem:

gem build pollster.gemspec

Then either install the gem locally:

gem install ./pollster-2.0.0.gem

(for development, run gem install --dev ./pollster-1.0.0.gem to install the development dependencies)

or publish the gem to a gem hosting service, e.g. RubyGems.

Finally add this to the Gemfile:

gem 'pollster', '~> 2.0.0'

Install from Git

If the Ruby gem is hosted at a git repository: https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/YOUR_GIT_REPO, then add the following in the Gemfile:

gem 'pollster', :git => 'https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/YOUR_GIT_REPO.git'

Include the Ruby code directly

Include the Ruby code directly using -I as follows:

ruby -Ilib script.rb

Getting Started

Please follow the installation procedure and then run the following code:

# Load the gem
require 'pollster'

api = Pollster::Api.new

opts = { 
  cursor: nil,                            # Special string to index into the Array
  tags: "2016-president",                 # Comma-separated list of tag slugs
  election_date: Date.parse("2013-10-20") # Date of an election
}

begin
  result = api.charts_get(opts)
  p result
rescue Pollster::ApiError => e
  puts "Exception when calling Api->charts_get: #{e}"
end

API documentation

Perhaps the best documentation is example.rb: it shows how to use all API endpoints and how to paginate.

See https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/api/v2/help for more details.

See https://app.swaggerhub.com/api/huffpostdata/pollster-api/2.0.0 for full API documentation. The Ruby-specific warts:

For the TSV endpoints questions/{slug}/poll-responses-clean.tsv and charts/{slug}/pollster-chart-poll-questions.tsv, the return values include a responses Hash that maps from label (String) to value (Float).
Ruby API method names are snake-cased versions of the API endpoints and end with _get. For example, the Ruby method to access questions/{slug}/poll-responses-clean.tsv is api.questions_slug_poll_responses_clean_tsv_get(slug).

Author

Adam Hooper, [email protected].