Mapping Hacks

Automatically Geocode U.S. Addresses #80

Chapter 7, Names and Places

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407

HACK

my $where = shift @ARGV

or die "Usage: $0 \"111 Main St, Anytown, KS\"\n";

my $addr = uri_escape($where);

print get "http://rpc.geocoder.us/service/rest?address=$addr";

Call the program by putting an address on the command line:

./simplest_rest.pl "1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA"

You can also substitute + for spaces and skip the quotes:

./simplest_rest.pl 1005+Gravenstein+Hwy+N+Sebastopol+CA

The full RDF document as shown in Figure 7-3 is returned. This can be

parsed with the Perl module

RDF::Simple::Parser.

Geocoding a List of Addresses

The Monterey Express is a dive boat in Monterey, California. A list of dive-

related resources for the boat is maintained at http://www.montereyexpress.

com/DiveLinks.htm. A real-world application would be to geocode these

addresses in order to create a “find your closest dive resource” application.

This sample Perl code fetches the list, does a simplistic (and demonstrably

wrong in some cases) parse to get the addresses, geocodes the addresses, and

returns the results:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# divecode.pl - Geocode the Monterey Express dive resources list

use LWP::Simple;

use XMLRPC::Lite;

my $lines;

#$lines = get "http://www.montereyexpress.com/DiveLinks.htm";

#or use STDIN

{local $/; undef $/; $lines = <>;}

my ($shop_name, $shop_address);

while ($lines =~ s/(.+)<br>//m) {

$st = $1;

chomp $st; ...