Alan’s (Old) Blogometer

I didn’t take notes on installing Geo::Coder::US, but it was straightward. I fired up CPAN, and typed install Geo::Coder::US and away it went. Then when it was done I fetched the TigerLINE files for Louisiana and the FIPS 55 data, the “all” zip archive, rather than Louisiana specific. You’ll note that the TigerLINE page is perfect for a wget -r, which is what I used.

I imported the data using the scripts mentioned in the documentation.

[alan@tno ~] /tno/bin/perl /tno/geo/eg/import_fips.pl 
    /tno/var/geo/gecode.db 
    AllFIPS55_20050215.txt
[alan@tno ~] /tno/bin/perl /tno/geo/eg/import_tiger_zip.pl 
    /tno/var/geo/geocode.db 
    tiger/*.zip

You’ll notice that I’ve build a Perl for the project, rather than using the system Perl. I used to do a lot of work with Apache and mod_perl, where I developed this practice.

Then I can write a simple Perl script to geocode an address.

#!/tno/bin/perl

use Geo::Coder::US;
use Data::Dumper;

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

# Terranova Bother's Supermarket...
my @matches = Geo::Coder::US->geocode(
    "3308 Esplanade, New Orleans, LA");

for (@matches) {
    print "Location: $$_{lat} $$_{long}n";
}

my @matches = Geo::Coder::US->geocode(
   "Esplanade & Grand Route St John, New Orleans, LA");

for (@matches) {
    print "Location: $$_{lat} $$_{long}n";
}

Good to go. The next step is to create a CGI script that can generate an XML reponse that I can get to from JavaScript and XSLT 2.0.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 12:44 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.