Alan’s (Old) Blogometer

Geocoding is installed. Now to create a REST interface I can use from XML.

My most recent survey of Perl XML land revealed XML::Dumper, which is an awful lot like Data::Dumper, but it dumps XML instead of Perl source code. Easy.

I don’t care about the semantics of the document. It doesn’t get my panties in a bunch to see <arrayref/> and <perldata/> in resulting document. The document is small, and it will be consumed directly.

I can use XML::Dumper to dump the result of the function call to Geo::Coder::US, and this is done. I can use this script anywhere in XSLT 2.0 with a call to document.

document(’http://thinknola.com/cgi-bin/geocode?8300+Explanade,+New+Orleans,+LA’)

Start with a CGI refresher.

#!/tno/bin/perl

print "<document>@{[ CGI::unescape($ENV{QUERY_STRING}) ]}</document>";

This will spit out the CGI query string, unescaped, inside a tiny XML document. Given a URI like the following…

http://thinknola.com/cgi/geocode?3308+Esplanade,+New+Orleans,+LA

I get a this result document.

3308 Esplanade, New Orleans, LA

Now I can feed that to Geo::Coder::US, and feed the result to XML::Dumper.

#!/tno/bin/perl

use CGI;
use XML::Dumper;
use Geo::Coder::US;

use strict;

Geo::Coder::US->set_db("/tno/var/geo/geocode.db");

my $address = CGI::unescape($ENV{QUERY_STRING} || '');
my @matches = Geo::Coder::US->geocode($address);

my $dump = new XML::Dumper;

my $cgi = new CGI();

print $cgi->header("text/xml");

print $dump->pl2xml(@matches);

You can try for yourself, but if you decide to use it as a service, I’ll have to shut it down to the public.

http://thinknola.com/cgi/geocode?3308+Esplanade,+New+Orleans,+LA.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Programming, Think New Orleans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.