Changelog

v1.5.0 (2026-04-29)

The cache now uses OS-appropriate directories, segmented by package version. On Linux the default is ~/.cache/imf_reader/<version>/; on macOS ~/Library/Caches/imf_reader/<version>/; on Windows %LOCALAPPDATA%\imf_reader\<version>\. The version segment means upgrading the package automatically starts with a clean cache.
Users on Linux who want to reclaim disk space from the old hardcoded cache can run rm -rf ~/.cache/imf_reader/ after upgrading, or call cache.set_cache_dir(...) to keep using the previous location.
A new environment variable IMF_READER_CACHE_DIR lets you override the cache location without changing code — useful on shared infrastructure or in CI.
A new unified imf_reader.cache API replaces the scattered module-level helpers: clear_cache(scope=...), set_cache_dir, reset_cache_dir, get_cache_dir, enable_cache, and disable_cache.
WEO bulk SDMX downloads are now cached on disk and survive process restarts. A corrupted zip is detected automatically and evicted; retrying the same call re-downloads cleanly (cache.BulkPayloadCorruptError is raised so callers can handle it explicitly).
SDR data (allocations and holdings, exchange rates, interest rates) now persists across process restarts, matching the behaviour WEO users already had.
weo.clear_cache() and sdr.clear_cache() continue to work and emit a DeprecationWarning pointing at cache.clear_cache(). They will be removed in v2.0.

The new API implements a different scaling value behaviour. To preserve backwards compatibility, this new version aligns with the old behaviour.

The October 2025 release of WEO removed bulk downloads and moved everything towards the SDMX API. This update provides a way to parse new releases from the API instead of relying on the XML files. Note that thew new API response does not include observation-level notes or information on when projections start for each country-indicator.

First stable release of imf-reader with full functionality for accessing WEO data