Disclosure first, because rule 1: I used this dataset to build a free iOS app, so I am not a neutral party here. Posting it because the dataset is genuinely good and I could not find it discussed on this sub.
Italian law requires every fuel station operator to file its prices with the Ministry of Enterprise, and the Ministry republishes the whole lot daily under IODL 2.0. Around 23,955 stations and roughly 93,000 prices, split across a price file and a station registry that carries address, brand and a self service flag.
The part I find unusual is that every individual price carries the timestamp of when that operator filed it. Most national fuel feeds I have looked at hand you a number and tell you nothing about its age. Here you can actually measure it: the median price is one day old, 71.8% are under 24 hours, 93.3% under three days, and 0.6% are more than a month old. That last sliver matters more than its size suggests, because pump prices drift upward, so a station that quietly stops filing keeps an old low number and floats straight to the top of any cheapest-first sort.
One warning if you go to parse it. The file is pipe delimited and does not escape pipes, so 106 rows carry a literal pipe inside a field. There are also 2,466 unbalanced double quotes sitting in company names, which means any reader treating the quote character as an enclosure will silently merge rows and hand you no error at all. I gave up and split on raw pipes without touching quotes. Worth knowing that the values are not sanity checked either: diesel gets filed at €0.123 and at €8.888, about 74 rows a day.
Does anyone know of another country publishing fuel prices at station level with a per-station filing timestamp? I have been through the French and Spanish feeds and both are day resolution at best, which is enough to sort but not enough to tell a driver whether to trust a number.
(The app is Riserva, if it matters for the disclosure. Italy only.)
submitted by /u/BigBalli
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