ActiveState Code

Recipe 576552: Earth co-ordinates retriever

Feed this CGI script the name of a place and it will give you it's longitude and latitude. Entering the search phrase in the format 'country, city' will give a more accurate result. A Google maps API key is required.

Python 
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import urllib
from time import sleep
print 'Content-type: text/html\n\n'
print '<head><title>CO-ORDINATES</title></head>'

key = "YOUR-GOOGLE_MAPS-API-KEY"

def location2latlong(query, key=key):
    """Get the ( latitute, longitude ) coordinates corresponding
    to the query. If something goes wrong return None."""

    output = 'csv'

    params = {}
    params['key'] = key
    params['output'] = output
    params['q'] = query

    params = urllib.urlencode(params)

    try:
        f = urllib.urlopen("http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?%s" % params)
    except IOError:
        # maybe some local problem at google? let's try again
        sleep(3)
        try:
            f = urllib.urlopen("http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?%s" % params)
        except IOError:
            # okay we give up
            return None

    response = f.read().split(',')
    f.close()

    try:
        status = response[0]
        accuracy = response[1]
        latitude = response[2]
        longitude = response[3]
    except:
        return None

    if status != '200':
        return None
    else:
        return latitude, longitude

if __name__ == '__main__':
        import cgi
        form = cgi.FieldStorage()
        r = None
        if not r:
                print """
                        <head><title> CO-ORDINATES</title></head>
                        <form method="post" action="co-ordinates">
                        <input type="text" name="location"><br>
                        <input type="submit" value="Get Co-ordinates"><br>"""
        if not form.has_key('location'):
                exit(-1)
        q = form.getvalue('location')
        r = location2latlong(q)
        if r is not None:
                print """
                        <head><title>CO-ORDINATES</title></head>
                        <b><font color='bage'>
                        [ %s ] |||> %s Latitude ::: %s Longitude
                        </font></b>
                        """ % (q, r[0], r[1])
        else:
                print '%s? Sorry, never heard of it.' % q

Discussion

Experimenting with Google maps and Python.

Comments

  1. 1. At 9:22 a.m. on 21 apr 2009, Francisco Treviño said:

    Hi. I am trying to run this script with my API GoogleMaps key in linux, with no results but:

    Content-type: text/html

    <head><title>CO-ORDINATES</title></head> <head><title> CO-ORDINATES</title></head> <form method="post" action="co-ordinates"> <input type="text" name="location"><br> <input type="submit" value="Get Co-ordinates"><br>

    Any ideas why? Thanks.

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