Get Legislation Section
legislation_get_sectionUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a known Act / SI and want the parsed text of a specific section, regulation, or article, with extent and in-force metadata.
Returns the provision's own text and its own heading — never a neighbouring or enclosing Part/Chapter's content. Also returns territorial extent, in-force status, and prospective flag. Content capped per max_chars (default 10,000, ~2,500 tokens) — raise for unusually long definition sections; check content_truncated in the response.
Works uniformly across Act sections ('section-N'), SI regulations ('regulation-N'), and SI articles ('article-N') — pass the bare number regardless of which the document uses; you don't need to know which noun applies. Raises a not_found error (rather than returning a plausible but wrong node) if the number doesn't exist in this document — check legislation_get_toc for valid numbers.
ALWAYS check extent — a section may apply to England & Wales but not
Scotland or Northern Ireland. Reciting a section without checking
extent is a recurring legal-research error.
Alternative: call read_resource(uri="legislation://{type}/{year}/{number}/ section/{section}") for raw CLML XML; use this tool when you want the parsed structured response instead.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| type | Yes | Legislation type code: 'ukpga' (Acts), 'uksi' (SIs), 'asp' (Scottish Acts), 'nia' (NI Acts). Use the value from legislation_search results. | |
| year | Yes | Year of enactment | |
| number | Yes | Chapter or SI number | |
| section | Yes | Provision number, e.g. '47' or '12A' — works for Act sections, SI regulations, and SI articles alike. Use the numeric part only — not 'section-47'/'regulation-47'/'article-47'. Schedules are not currently supported. | |
| max_chars | No | Maximum characters of section content to return. Default 10,000 (~2,500 tokens) covers almost every section. Raise to 50,000+ only for unusually long Finance Act definition sections. Check content_truncated in the response to see if it was cut. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| title | Yes | Section title or heading | |
| extent | No | Territorial extent: list of 'England', 'Wales', 'Scotland', 'Northern Ireland'. Empty list means unknown — do not assume full UK extent. | |
| content | Yes | Plain text content of the section, possibly truncated per max_chars. Check content_truncated and original_length for full-text information. | |
| in_force | No | False if the section is explicitly marked repealed in CLML. True only when an InForce element is present in the section body (rare). Null for most sections — the data.xml endpoint does not carry a per-section current in-force boolean; null does not mean repealed. | |
| warnings | No | Non-fatal retrieval or parsing warnings the caller should disclose where relevant. | |
| prospective | No | True if this section has not yet come into force; None if unknown | |
| version_date | No | Date of the version retrieved | |
| source_format | No | Source parsed for this response. html_fallback means CLML XML was unavailable and text was parsed from the public HTML page. | xml |
| section_number | Yes | Section number, e.g. '47', '12A', 'Schedule 2' | |
| original_length | No | Original plain-text length in characters before any truncation | |
| content_truncated | No | True if content was cut to fit max_chars |