Bluebell is a (fairly) generic Akoma Ntoso 3 parser, supporting all hierarchical elements and multiple document types.

Bluebell supports these Akoma Ntoso (AKN) root document types:

• act, bill (hierarchicalStructure → <Act> / <Bill>)
• debateReport, doc, statement (openStructure → <DebateReport>, <Doc>, <Statement>)
• debate (debateStructure → <Debate>)
• judgment (judgmentStructure → <Judgment>)

Bluebell tries to walk the line between being expressive and supporting a range of AKN documents and structures, while being simple to use and not requiring that authors have an in-depth knowledge of AKN.

Bluebell will always produce structurally valid Akoma Ntoso, no matter what input is given. It will never refuse to parse malformed input. If it does, it's a bug.

Full documentation: https://laws.africa/bluebell/

Bluebell is available in four forms, all producing the same Akoma Ntoso XML output. Choose based on your platform and use case:

The reference implementation. Supports both parsing Bluebell markup to XML and unparsing XML back to Bluebell text.

Install from PyPI:

pip install bluebell-akn

From the command line, parse an act in act.txt and output pretty XML:

bluebell /za/act/2020/1 act act.txt --pretty

From Python code:

from bluebell import parse_to_xml, parse_to_xml_bytes, parse_to_xml_str

xml = parse_to_xml_str("""
CHAPTER 1 - Heading

  SECTION 1 - Short title

    Some introductory text.

  SECTION 2

    This section has two items:

    ITEMS
      ITEM (a)
        Here is item (a) text.

      ITEM (B)
        Here is item (b) text.
""", "act", "/akn/za/act/2009/1")
print(xml)

For unparse and more examples, see https://laws.africa/bluebell/.

An optional native extension that accelerates the Python API using Rust.

Install both packages:

pip install bluebell-akn bluebell-akn-rs

No code changes needed — parse_to_xml() and friends automatically use the Rust parser when the extension is installed, and fall back to pure Python when it isn't. (AkomaNtosoParser always remains pure Python.)

The extension is in crates/bluebell-python/.

The Rust parser compiled to WebAssembly. Load directly in the browser (no bundler) from a CDN, or install via npm.

Install from npm:

npm install @lawsafrica/bluebell-wasm

Minimal browser example (no bundler):

<script type="module">
  import initWasm, { parseToXml } from "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@lawsafrica/bluebell-wasm@4/bluebell_wasm.js";
  await initWasm();
  const xml = parseToXml("SEC 1. - Heading\n\n  Some content.", "act", "/akn/za/act/2022/1");
</script>

For details and the Node.js API, see crates/bluebell-wasm/README.md. The live demo at https://laws.africa/bluebell/demo/ runs on this package.

Parse-only Rust implementation, available as both a library (bluebell-core) and a CLI (bluebell-rs). Not published to crates.io; build from source in the repository.

From the command line:

cargo run -p bluebell-rs -- to-akn-xml /akn/za/act/2022/1 act tests/roundtrip/act.txt

For the current status, parity testing, and full command reference, see crates/README.md.

1. We use a version of canopy from github, so clone it into the same directory as this directory: git clone https://github.com/jcoglan/canopy.git
2. Build canopy: cd canopy; npm install; make; cd ..
3. Build grammar changes with make, which runs our Makefile to compile the grammar
4. Install the dev tools with pip install -e '.[dev]'
5. Run all the test suites (Python, Rust, WASM) with: poe test

Common development commands are defined as poe tasks in pyproject.toml; run poe with no arguments to list them. The Python suite alone is just python -m unittest.

Documentation from docs/ is built with MkDocs. To build and serve locally:

poe docs-serve

To build the static site:

poe docs

See RELEASING.md. In short: bump the version in both bluebell/__init__.py and the root Cargo.toml [workspace.package] (they must match), run poe test, then create a GitHub release, which publishes bluebell-akn and bluebell-akn-rs to PyPI and @lawsafrica/bluebell-wasm to npm.

Copyright 2020 Laws.Africa.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.