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A simple app for polling the Google geocoding API

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Geocoder

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This package provides a simple way of polling Google's geocoding API. In particular, it's useful when you have a lot of queries to make and you'll need to use multiple API keys to code them.

Requirements

Tested with Python 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5. All other requirements in requirements.in.

Note I only guarantee Python 3.5 support into the future because futures are awesome.

How to use

You'll need to create some Google API keys. Do that by going here.

Put them into a file. We'll call it keys for now.

In a separate file (called, say, input), create a csv in the format

ADDRESS,CITY,STATE,ZIP

of the addresses you want to geocode. Then simply call

geocoder geocode keys input --ouput-file geocodings

If you don't specify output-file, then it will print to standard out. The output will be in the format

INPUT_TO_GOOGLE_API,OUTPUT_OF_GOOGLE_API

Some of your addresses probably won't geocode, e.g., they may have some misspellings or aren't quite specific enough. You can fix these up after geocoding using the fixup command:

geocoder fixup keys geocodings --output-file fixed_up

The output will be in the format

ORIGINAL_INPUT_TO_GOOGLE_API,FIXED_UP_INPUT_TO_GOOGLE_API,OUTPUT_OF_GOOGLE_API

What do you get?

The output is quite raw. In particular, for every row that you have in your input file, you get a row in the output file. This is a csv whose first column is somewhat normalized version of the address in the input and whose second column is just the json that the Google API returns. Further processing can be added through modifying the geocoder/cli.py module or by postprocessing.

Caching

If you are expecting a lot of duplicate addresses in your runs, then you may want to cache your results from the API. This can be done by specifying a --cache-file. The key to the cache is the semi-normalized address (so nothing fancy).

Warning

This is not meant to be a super smart implementation. In particular, the cache is in memory and so if you have lots of addresses to geocode, you probably want to change that.

But if you have that many addresses, you probably are paying Google anyway. :)

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