GeonamesCache

A Python library that provides functions to retrieve names, ISO and FIPS codes of continents, countries as well as US states and counties as Python dictionaries. The country and city datasets also include population and geographic data.

Geonames data is obtained from GeoNames.

Installation

To install geonamescache, run: :

$ sudo pip install geonamescache

Or, if necessary: :

$ sudo easy_install geonamescache

Usage

A simple usage example:

import geonamescache

gc = geonamescache.GeonamesCache()
countries = gc.get_countries()
# print countries dictionary
print(countries)
# you really wanna do something more useful with the data...

Methods

Currently geonamescache provides the following methods, that return dictionaries with the requested data:

• get_continents()
• get_countries()
• get_us_states()
• get_cities()
• get_countries_by_names()
• get_us_states_by_names()
• get_cities_by_name(name)
• get_us_counties()

In addition you can search for cities by name.

• search_cities('NAME', case_sensitive=True)

This function returns a list of city records that match the given NAME.

• By default the alternatenames attribute is searched for matches.
• By default the search is case sensitive, it can be made case insensitive by changing case_sensitive to False.

Mappers

The mappers module provides function(s) to map data properties. Currently you can create a mapper that maps country properties, e. g. the name property to the iso3 property, to do so you'd write the following code:

from geonamescache.mappers import country
mapper = country(from_key='name', to_key='iso3')

iso3 = mapper('Spain') # iso3 is assigned ESP

Contributing

1. Fork the repository on GitHub
2. Commit your changes to the develop branch
3. Write test(s) for any new feature
4. Push your changes and send a pull request

If you wish to build the data from scratch, run make dl and make tojson.