PxWeb Statistics Extractor

Point at ANY PxWeb statistical service and get flat, fully-labeled statistics — one row per cell.

PxWeb (the open-source PC-Axis dissemination platform maintained by Statistics Sweden) is deployed by dozens of national and regional statistical offices — Statistics Sweden (SCB), Statistics Finland (StatFi), Norway, Iceland, Greenland and many more. Every one of them speaks the identical REST grammar: navigate a subject tree → GET a table's metadata → POST a dimension query → receive a compact JSON-stat2 dataset.

Most scrapers re-implement one country at a time. This actor is the generic decoder: point it at a PxWeb API root, name a table (or let it discover them), and it turns the compact, index-encoded JSON-stat2 into flat rows — one row per statistical cell, every dimension decoded to both its code and its human-readable name.

The value is the decode

A raw JSON-stat2 dataset is just a flat number array plus a shape:

{ "id": ["Region","Kon","ContentsCode","Tid"], "size": [1,2,1,1],
  "value": [5312519, 5239188], "dimension": { ...category index + label maps... } }

That array is meaningless without joining every linear index back to its per-dimension category. This actor does exactly that — it walks value[] in row-major order, maps each linear index to its per-dimension category position, and emits real columns:

Region	Region_label	Kon	Kon_label	metric	metricLabel	timePeriod	value	unit
00	Sweden	1	men	BE0101N1	Population	2023	5312519	number of persons
00	Sweden	2	women	BE0101N1	Population	2023	5239188	number of persons

Input

Field	Description
serviceRoot (required)	The PxWeb REST API root, e.g. https://api.scb.se/OV0104/v1/doris/en/ssd (SCB Sweden) or https://pxdata.stat.fi/PxWeb/api/v1/en/StatFin (StatFi Finland).
tablePath	Path (relative to the root) to a leaf .px table to query, e.g. BE/BE0101/BE0101A/BefolkningNy or synt/12dj.px. Leave empty or point at a navigation level to discover instead.
query	Optional explicit dimension selection. Simple form {"Region": ["00"], "Kon": ["1","2"], "Tid": ["2023"]} or the native PxWeb array. Leave empty to auto-select (see below).
lastNPeriods	When auto-selecting, how many of the most recent time periods to fetch. Default 1.
discoveryRecurse / maxDepth	In discovery mode, walk the subject tree depth-first and emit every leaf table found.
maxRecords	Cap on rows emitted (each row = one billable record).
bearer / extraHeaders	Optional auth for gated services. Never required for public dissemination, never logged.

Auto-query (no query supplied)

The actor builds a small, always-valid query from the table's metadata: the last N periods of the time dimension, all values of small mandatory dimensions, and it aggregates over eliminable dimensions (so you get the grand total instead of a combinatorial cell explosion). This returns real data on any table without you having to know its dimensions up front.

Modes (auto-selected)

• Data — the path points at a leaf table → GET metadata → POST query → decode JSON-stat2 into one labeled row per cell.
• Discovery — the path points at a navigation level (or is empty) → list the subject-tree nodes so you can find tables. Turn on Recurse to walk levels and emit leaf tables with their full paths.

Output

One flat row per cell (data mode) or per navigation node (discovery mode). Every dimension becomes a {CODE} + {CODE}_label column pair; canonical timePeriod / metric / metricLabel / value / unit / decimals columns are promoted from the JSON-stat2 roles; source, label, updated, tablePath provenance is stamped on every row; and a lossless _raw object keeps the exact cell coordinates, codes, labels and value.

Empty results (a query that matches nothing, an empty table) return 0 records and a clean exit — never a crash, never fabricated data.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: one record charge per emitted row.

The run's maximum charge is respected too: the Actor never fetches or returns a row it cannot bill, and stops cleanly when the budget runs out. If a recursive discovery walk cannot read a level, the rows already returned are kept and billed, and the run is marked failed so a partial walk is never reported as complete.

Notes

• Two PxWeb dialects exist: the classic grammar (/PxWeb/api/v1/{lang}/... and SCB's doris variant) is fully supported; the Statbank REST variant (api.statbank.dk/v1/...) is best-effort for navigation.
• PxWeb servers cap the number of cells per query. If a selection exceeds the cap the actor automatically retries with a reduced selection.
• JSON-stat2 is requested explicitly (format: json-stat2) and decoded by its size/id/ dimension shape.
• No authentication is needed for public statistics dissemination.