ULS

This gem is used for parsing the database/files from the FCC Universal Licensing System. These files are often relevant to amateur radio enthusiasts.

You may download the source files from the FCC by visiting the Universal Licensing System Databases page.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'uls'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install uls

Configuration of various options are available via the base ULS module. To configure ULS related settings:

ULS.configure do |config|
  config.tmpdir = '/your/tmpdir/here'
end

The options currently available are as follows:

The FCC splits their data into several categories. Each category is represented as a class method on ULS::Retriever. From there, you may select either the daily or weekly file for a specific types. Types are driven by the category but for most categories the types are applications or licenses.

For example, to download the entire license database for amateur radio:

compressed_database_path = ULS::Retriever.amateur_radio.weekly(:licenses)

This will return a absolute path to a zip file once the download is complete.

The weekly database contains all of the data and is republished weekly. Daily database updates are also provided that are much smaller and only contain the specified day's data:

compressed_database_path = ULS::Retriever.amateur_radio.daily(:licenses)

The above line will download the previous day's updates. It also takes a second parameter which corresponds to the Date#wday value. So if you wanted to download last Tuesday's daily license file:

compressed_database_path = ULS::Retriever.amateur_radio.daily(:licenses, 2)

After you have an available database to work with, you may start interacting with the records within it:

database = ULS::Database.new(compressed_database_path)
database.name_and_addresses.each_record do |record|
  # do something
end

When you're done with a database, you can clean up the extracted files using:

database.clean

If you're completely done with this version of the database then this command will remove the zip file:

database.delete

If you want to do both:

database.delete!

The above will not only remove all the extracted files but also delete the compressed file.

After checking out the repo, run bundle install to install dependencies. Then, run rspec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/gdubin/uls. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the ULS project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.