A small CLI tool to take a .fec filing and turn it into a collection of CSVs, one for each form type.
$ npm install -g fec2csv`
$ fec2csv path/to/file.fec [path/to/output/dir]
fec2csv expects at least one argument but can take two. The first one, which is required, is the path to the .fec source file. The second, which is optional, is the path to the directory where fec2csv should put the generated files. This will default to the current directory (.).
This tool creates nice CSV files out of those files to do analysis quickly. The FEC publishes .fec files really quickly, but they're sort of hard to use. First, the .fec file isn't actually a rectangular table. It is a single file with all of the different types of FEC submissions combined into table.
The work horse of this tool is fec-parser by @chriszs, which in turn uses code from the Fech Ruby gem by Derek Willis and others, and the csv-parser module by Mathias Buus, Max Ogden and others.