Simon Willison’s Weblog

geocoders. A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services.

Posted 27th May 2009 at 10:02 am

Tagged geocoders, geocoding, geonames, github, google, jacobkaplanmoss, placemaker, projects, python, webservices, yahoo

6 comments

I also wrote a Python wrapper for Placemaker: python-placemaker. It can take a string or a URL and pass it to the Placemaker API.
Aaron - 27th May 2009 14:50 - #
Small suggestion for improvement: how about using decimal.Decimal objects instead of floats?

Adrian Holovaty - 27th May 2009 18:10 - #
Why not geopy? http://code.google.com/p/geopy/

Michael - 27th May 2009 18:51 - #
Michael: no reason, geopy looks great.

Adrian: I'm not sure decimal objects would offer a definite advantage here. Once you get past four or five decimal places in a lat/long you're down to metres anyway, and none of the geocoders it's using are nearly that accurate.

Simon Willison - 27th May 2009 19:01 - #
Are you swapping lat & lon on your Google results or is your example just wrong? If I remember correctly Google is weird and returns location data as lon/lat instead of lat/lon like everyone else in the world is used to.

Mike Malone - 27th May 2009 20:09 - #
Oops, thanks Mike - fixed.

Simon Willison - 27th May 2009 23:09 - #