@pipeworx/north-dakota-code

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Tools: 2

North Dakota Century Code — state statutes by citation and by official catchline (topic search). Keyless.

Tools

• nd_statute(citation) — full text of a North Dakota Century Code section by citation (“12.1-16-01” is murder; “47-16-13.1” is a landlord’s duty to maintain a rental unit). Resolves the citation to its one chapter PDF, fetches it live, and extracts the text.
• nd_search(query, limit?) — topic/keyword search over the Legislature’s own official section and chapter catchlines (not full statutory prose — see below), returning matching citations.

Auth

Keyless.

The survey trap did not fully apply here

The recorded trap for this pack family was “published only as PDF” — true for the statutory TEXT (ndlegis.gov serves each chapter as a small PDF, cencode/t12-1c16.pdf), but the Legislature also publishes one combined HTML page listing every title, chapter, and section with its official catchline:

https://ndlegis.gov/general-information/north-dakota-century-code/index.html

That page is ~9.5 MB and covers the WHOLE Code (~29,000 sections, 1,740 chapters, 74 titles) in a single document — too large to fetch per call, and there is no lighter per-title listing page (unlike Iowa’s) and no search API for the Code (ndlegis.gov’s bill-tracking side has a JSON API; the Code side does not, confirmed live). So it is fetched and baked ONCE into src/nd-index-data.ts — citation + official catchline + chapter/title context, NOT statutory text — by scripts/bake-index.mjs, the same “baked table” shape mcps/symmap uses for its herb table. nd_search reads that baked table entirely in memory; nd_statute uses it only to resolve a citation to its one chapter PDF before fetching and extracting that PDF live, so the statutory text itself is never baked or redistributed.

Refresh path

Re-run the bake script whenever North Dakota recodifies (new session laws land continuously; the index page updates on its own schedule):

node mcps/north-dakota-code/scripts/bake-index.mjs > mcps/north-dakota-code/src/nd-index-data.ts

It fails loudly (not silently) if the page shrinks below ~1 MB or parses to suspiciously few rows — both would mean ndlegis.gov changed its markup rather than that the Code got smaller.

pdf-text.ts needed two real extensions for this state

shared/src/pdf-text.ts (built for Kentucky’s per-statute PDFs) didn’t handle North Dakota’s chapter PDFs out of the box — fixed in a separate commit, with a test:

• Every content stream writes /Length as an INDIRECT reference (/Length 12 0 R) rather than inlining the literal integer. The original detection regex was a backtracking trap for a multi-digit referenced object number (it would silently resolve to the literal integer 1 instead of following the reference) — rewritten as an explicit optional group with nothing to backtrack.
• The body text font is a simple (non-Type0) TrueType subset with no /Encoding at all — unreadable as WinAnsi bytes. Its own /ToUnicode CMap (keyed by a 1-byte code, unlike Type0’s 2-byte CID) is the only place the real character is recorded, so the extractor now checks for that whenever a simple font isn’t declared WinAnsi.
• /Font itself is an indirect reference inside Resources (/Font 18 0 R), which Kentucky’s PDFs never used — resolved the same way /Pages already was.

Sectioning without reliable whitespace

Once extracted, a chapter’s text has no reliable line break between sections — headings run directly into the body (“12.1-16-01. Murder.1.A person is guilty…”). sliceNdSection builds its heading boundaries from the chapter’s OWN verified citation list (already known from the baked index, not a generic number pattern), which rules out matching a cross-reference to a citation in a different chapter; the usual most-text-wins tie-break still guards the rare same-chapter cross-reference that happens to end a sentence at the same number.

Four capabilities — two available, two are not

• Citation lookup — available (nd_statute).
• Topic/keyword search — available (nd_search), but it matches official CATCHLINES, not full statutory prose. North Dakota does not publish a full-text search of Code section text (verified live). A query like “landlord” still surfaces 7 real sections (e.g. “Landlord obligations - Maintenance of premises”) even though no CHAPTER is named “Landlord and Tenant” — the sections are scattered across Titles 28, 31, 35, and 47, which only the section-level catchline index catches.
• Amendments/enactment history — not available for an in-force section. ndlegis.gov’s current online Code shows no “History:”/“Amended by” line for a section still in force (verified across a full chapter, 47-16, Leasing of Real Property: zero such lines across ~40 live sections). A REPEALED or REDESIGNATED section’s one-line disposition (“Repealed by S.L. 1977, ch. 429, § 7.”) is the only session-law citation the Code pages carry at all, and nd_statute returns it as-is in text rather than suppressing it. Reconstructing real amendment history would mean parsing North Dakota’s separate Session Laws archive (ndlegis.gov/research-and-archives/session-laws, one PDF volume per legislative session, not indexed by section) — out of scope here.
• Historical version (a section’s text as it read before an amendment) — not available. ndlegis.gov’s own historical archive (research-and-archives/historical-constitution-and-century-code) only reaches pre-1930 Revised Codes/Compiled Laws (1877-1925) — long before Title 12.1 (the Criminal Code, enacted 1973) or most of the modern Code existed — and there is no per-year archive of the current-era Code the way Iowa or Indiana publish. The current online edition is the only one.

Citations

North Dakota cites by title-chapter-section, e.g. “12.1-16-01” (Title 12.1, Chapter 16, Section 01: Murder) or “47-16-13.1” (Title 47, Chapter 16, Section 13.1: landlord maintenance duty). The chapter and section can each carry a decimal suffix (“12.1-27.2-02”, “47-16-07.3”) — nd_statute looks the citation up against the baked index directly rather than parsing it into parts, so any suffix shape the index itself uses round-trips correctly.

Data sources

• https://ndlegis.gov/general-information/north-dakota-century-code/index.html — the title/chapter/section/catchline index for the whole Code. Baked once into src/nd-index-data.ts; never fetched per call.
• https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t12-1c16.pdf — one chapter’s full statutory text (here, Title 12.1 Chapter 16 — swap the filename for any other chapter). nd_statute fetches this live on every call and extracts the target section out of it.

Both are plain, keyless, server-rendered HTML/PDF — no login, no JS, no rate-limit observed during development.

Tools

• nd_statute — Get the FULL TEXT of a section of the North Dakota Century Code — North Dakota state law — by citation. “12.1-16-01” is murder; “47-16-13.1” is a landlord’s duty to maintain a rental unit. Accepts nat
• nd_search — Search the North Dakota Century Code BY TOPIC or keyword rather than citation — “landlord security deposit”, “concealed weapon permit”, “homicide”. Matches against the Legislature’s own official secti