Mapping Hacks

408

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Chapter 7, Names and Places

#80 Automatically Geocode U.S. Addresses

HACK

-> result;

# assume we only get one address

print $result->[0]->{lat} . ',' . $result->[0]->{long};

print "\n\n";

}

# just assume that the shop name is the line before the address

$shop_name = $st;

}

To run this hack, just execute the script, which produces the following

results:

Rich-Gibson-iBook:~/wa/geohacks/geocode_web_service rich$ ./divecode.pl

Aquatic Dreams Scuba Center,1212 Kansas Avenue, Modesto, CA 95351,37.

647585,-121.028297

Bamboo Reef (Monterey),614 Lighthouse Avenue, Monterey, CA 93940,36.613716,-

121.901494

Bamboo Reef,584 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107,37.778529,-122.396631

...

Out of 26 “legitimate” addresses, all but four were successfully geocoded.

The remaining four didn’t work because the addresses were broken across

extra lines in the original document, and I didn’t write a very good parser.

Better results could be obtained by using the

HTML::Parser module and

spending a bit more time studying this particular data set, but the goal was

to illustrate how easy it can be to get 85% success with such a simplistic

approach (and 37 lines of Perl).

Happy geocoding!

Setting up your own Geocoding server

Do you have too many addresses to geocode, or want the control of running

your own server? You can set up your own geocoder with the Geocoder

code.

You need to install the Perl Module

Geo::Coder::US from CPAN, ...