Geocoding libraries [closed]

Question

I'm using python and I need to map locations like "Bloomington, IN" to GPS coordinates so I can measure distances between them. What Geocoding libraries/APIs do you recommend? Solutions in other languages are also welcome.

Answer 1

Geopy lets you choose from several geocoders (including Google, Yahoo, Virtual Earth).

Answer 2

The Google's web service is very easy to use. Just put the query in the URL. To make it even easier/lazier, I will shamelessly advertise pygeocoder, a Python wrapper for Google Geocoding. Then you can just do something like

print Geocoder.geocode("Montreal, Canada")[0].coordinates

to get a tuple with coordinates. You can also do stuff like

Geocoder.geocode("sushi, San Francisco").count

or

Geocoder.geocode("sushi, San Francisco")[0].postal_code

Answer 3

The Google Maps API supports geocoding, and the Python Cookbook has a simple example of accessing it from Python (although the recipe doesn't use the API directly, just simple maps.google.com URLs).