This repository provides useful data around Swiss Municipalities from the "Historisiertes Gemeindeverzeichnis" (historical municipalities directory) provided by the Swiss government:
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/grundlagen/agvch/historisiertes-gemeindeverzeichnis.html
The provided data is very thorough but not easy to deal with. It's a pretty information-dense XML file. This repository means to build useful JSON data using said XML. Data that can be understood without reading a lengthy manual.
So far there's only one resulting output, but there may be more.
The by_year.py python script provides the full municipality name as well as
the district - if available - keyed by the id/BFS-Nummer. It provides separate
files by year and canton as well as one large file with all years and all
cantons.
It's possible to add additional data to the files using the JSON in the
extensions folder. For every year since the year given in the JSON the data
is added to the municipality with the given BFS-Nummer. At the moment,
additional districts (region) and super districts (superregion) used for
Kantonsrats-, Landrats- and Grossratswahlen are defined for a few cantons and
years.
To generate the latest data run python by_year.py. Note that this script
requires Python 3.4+.
The URL file contains the url to the "Historisiertes Gemeindeverzeichnis
der Schweiz (XML Format)" zip file of the Swiss Governement. This url typically
changes over time (especially when new data is released around new year). It is
found on the website mentioned at the beginning of this readme. After updating
the URL, make sure to delete your local data.xml.