I need to geocode an address to a latitude, longitude pair to display on Google Maps, but I need to do this server-side in Django. I could only find reference to the Javascript V3 API. How do I do it from Python?
5 Answers
I would strongly recommend to use geopy. It will return the latitude and longitude, you can use it in the Google JS client afterwards.
>>> from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim >>> geolocator = Nominatim() >>> location = geolocator.geocode("175 5th Avenue NYC") >>> print(location.address) Flatiron Building, 175, 5th Avenue, Flatiron, New York, NYC, New York, ... >>> print((location.latitude, location.longitude)) (40.7410861, -73.9896297241625) Additionally you can specifically define you want to use Google services by using GoogleV3 class as a geolocator
>>> from geopy.geocoders import GoogleV3 >>> geolocator = GoogleV3() 
Comments
I would suggest using Py-Googlemaps. To use it is easy:
from googlemaps import GoogleMaps gmaps = GoogleMaps(API_KEY) lat, lng = gmaps.address_to_latlng(address) EDIT: If necessary, install Py-Googlemaps via: sudo easy_install googlemaps.
3 Comments
powerj1984
Is it possible to get API keys that work with this library anymore? I generated a Javascript v3 API key but it doesn't seem to be working.
Dennis Jaheruddin
@powerj1984 I get a warning for malware when I try to access your link, is that normal or should I be worried?
powerj1984
When I posted the link there was no warning for malware. Not sure what's going on now.
Google Data has an API for Maps has a REST-ful API - and they also have a Python library built around it already.
Comments
Here is the code working for Google Maps API v3 (based on this answer):
import urllib import simplejson googleGeocodeUrl = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?' def get_coordinates(query, from_sensor=False): query = query.encode('utf-8') params = { 'address': query, 'sensor': "true" if from_sensor else "false" } url = googleGeocodeUrl + urllib.urlencode(params) json_response = urllib.urlopen(url) response = simplejson.loads(json_response.read()) if response['results']: location = response['results'][0]['geometry']['location'] latitude, longitude = location['lat'], location['lng'] print query, latitude, longitude else: latitude, longitude = None, None print query, "<no results>" return latitude, longitude See official documentation for the complete list of parameters and additional information.
2 Comments
skjerns
this doesn't work anymore because google quires a personal API key to work: g.co/dev/maps-no-account
Dennis Golomazov
@skjerns thanks for the update! if it's easy to fix, feel free to update the answer
Python package googlemaps seems to be very able to do geocoding and reverse geocoding.
The latest version of googlemaps package is available at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/googlemaps
