Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sunday, 18th April 2021

TIL Enabling the fuzzystrmatch extension in PostgreSQL with a Django migration — The PostgreSQL [fuzzystrmatch extension](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/fuzzystrmatch.html) enables several functions for fuzzy string matching: `soundex()`, `difference()`, `levenshtein()`, `levenshtein_less_equal()`, `metaphone()`, `dmetaphone()` and `dmetaphone_alt()`.

country-coder (via) Given a latitude and longitude, how can you tell what country that point sits within? One way is to do a point-in-polygon lookup against a set of country polygons, but this can be tricky: some countries such as New Zealand have extremely complex outlines, even though for this use-case you don’t need the exact shape of the coastline. country-coder solves this with a custom designed 595KB GeoJSON file with detailed land borders but loosely defined ocean borders. It also comes with a wrapper JavaScript library that provides an API for resolving points, plus useful properties on each country with details like telepohen calling codes and emoji flags.

# 7:37 pm / gis, geojson

Weeknotes: The Aftermath

Some tweets that effectively illustrate my week:

[... 208 words]

Thursday, 15th April 2021
Tuesday, 20th April 2021

2021 » April

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