@pipeworx/dc-code

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/dc-code’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 2

District of Columbia Code (D.C. Code — DC statutes) — full section text by citation, and topic/chapter search over official headings.

Tools

• dc_statute(citation) — full current text of one D.C. Code section (e.g. "22-2101", murder in the first degree), with the official heading, disposition (in force / repealed / transferred / reserved), legislative History annotations, Prior Codifications, and Cross References.
• dc_search(query?, title?, limit?) — topic/keyword search over every section’s official heading (e.g. "eviction notice", "concealed carry permit"), optionally scoped to one title. Pass title alone (no query) to list every section under that title — a chapter-list/browse mode. Not full-text search — the DC Council does not publish one.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DCCouncil/law-xml-codified/{branch}/us/dc/council/code/titles/{title}/sections/{citation}.xml — one section’s current XML (its heading, body text, and annotations). dc_statute calls this live, per request, pinned to the branch baked below.
• Same repo’s us/dc/council/code/index.xml and titles/{title}/index.xml — structure only (title/chapter/subchapter headings + section citation lists, no catchlines). Used only by scripts/bake-index.mjs.
• https://api.github.com/repos/DCCouncil/law-xml-codified/branches — used only by scripts/bake-index.mjs to resolve the current publication branch (see below).

Licence — public domain, and why this pack is allowed to bake an index

code.dccouncil.gov’s own footer: “The codes and laws on this website are in the public domain.” The same footer: “Please do not scrape. Instead, bulk download the HTML or XML” from the Council’s GitHub organization. This pack follows that instruction literally — it never touches code.dccouncil.gov, only raw.githubusercontent.com content from DCCouncil/law-xml-codified. Public-domain content plus the publisher’s own explicit redistribution channel means baking a catchline index from this repo needs no separate grant (root CLAUDE.md, “mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not” — the licence-permits-it branch, not the silent/forbidden one). Statutory text itself is also never baked — dc_statute always fetches it live, per call.

The default-branch trap

GET /repos/DCCouncil/law-xml-codified reports default_branch: "publication/2021-10-18" — real git metadata, frozen at a 2021 codification, five years stale, even though the repo is actively published: 406 branches existed at bake time, the newest a publication/{base-date}.{amendment-date} pair updated within days. GitHub’s “default branch” setting is unrelated to which branch is current. scripts/bake-index.mjs lists every branch (paginated, ~5 unauthenticated requests) and picks the lexicographically-latest name — safe because every name is an ISO-8601 date or a dotted pair of them, so string order is chronological order. The resolved name is baked as DC_CODE_BRANCH and is what dc_statute’s live fetch pins to.

Section XML shape

A short section is one flat <text> element; a section with lettered/numbered subsections nests <para> elements, each with its own <num> (“(a)”) and <text>, repeatedly — sometimes nested one level deeper. A reason element reading “Repealed” (or Reserved/Transferred) marks a non-substantive stub whose body text is literally “Repealed.” — surfaced as disposition rather than left for the caller to infer. A trailing annotations block (History, Prior Codifications, Cross References, Editor’s Notes) is excluded from the body-text walk and returned as its own grouped fields.

One parsing trap worth knowing: a num or heading element can carry a NESTED inline element (e.g. Title 7 Chapter 2B’s chapter number carries an embedded effective-date annotation tag inside its own num element) — a tight “no-nested-tag” regex silently drops that chapter’s number instead of erroring. scripts/bake-index.mjs strips any nested tag content rather than assuming num/heading are always tag-free.

Capabilities — two available, two are not

• Citation lookup — dc_statute. Direct URL construction from the citation; no index lookup needed (title is the citation’s own prefix before its first -).
• Topic/chapter search — dc_search, over official headings only (see below). Matches 24,198 sections’ real headings, baked once per scripts/bake-index.mjs run — see its header for why per-section fetches were unavoidable (the index tree carries no catchlines, unlike South Dakota’s or Oklahoma’s siblings).
• Amendments/enactment history — PARTIALLY AVAILABLE. Every amended section’s annotations block carries one or more type="History" entries naming the enacting/amending Act; dc_statute returns these as history. There is no single canonical “effective date” field separate from these citations.
• Historical version (the text as it read before an amendment) — NOT AVAILABLE. DCCouncil/law-xml-codified publishes only the CURRENT codified text, no per-amendment archive and no endpoint returning a prior version’s text.

Refresh path

DC Council publishes a new amendment branch roughly every few days and a new base codification a few times a year. Re-run node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/dc-index-data.ts whenever a caller’s index_live_mismatch or a stale data_as_of suggests the baked index has fallen behind the live branch — nothing else in the pack needs to change; dc_statute always fetches section text live, pinned to whatever branch the bake most recently resolved. No scheduled workflow exists for this (same as every sibling state-code pack in this family) — it is a manual re-run.

Tools

• dc_statute — Get the FULL TEXT of a section of the District of Columbia Code (D.C. Code) — DC statutes — by citation. “22-2101” is murder in the first degree; “42-3505.01” covers eviction notice requirements. Acce
• dc_search — Search the District of Columbia Code by TOPIC/keyword, and/or browse one TITLE’s chapters and sections. Pass “query” to search official section headings (catchlines) — e.g. “landlord eviction notice”,