Previously I posted how to use the geopy python library to call the Google geocode API. But somewhere along the way my version of geopy was not working (maybe because the API changed). Instead of figuring out that problem, I just wrote my own function to call the Google API directly. No need to worry about installing geopy.

Part of the reason I blog is so I have notes for myself – I’m pretty sure I’ve rewritten this several times for different quick geocoding projects, but I couldn’t find them this morning when I needed to do it again. So here is a blog post for my own future reference.

Here is the function, it takes as input the full string address. Also I was getting back some null responses by rapid fire calling the API (with only 27 addresses), so I set the function to delay for five seconds and that seemed to fix that problem.

import urllib, json, time
def GoogGeoAPI(address,api="",delay=5):
  base = r"https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?"
  addP = "address=" + address.replace(" ","+")
  GeoUrl = base + addP + "&key=" + api
  response = urllib.urlopen(GeoUrl)
  jsonRaw = response.read()
  jsonData = json.loads(jsonRaw)
  if jsonData['status'] == 'OK':
    resu = jsonData['results'][0]
    finList = [resu['formatted_address'],resu['geometry']['location']['lat'],resu['geometry']['location']['lng']]
  else:
    finList = [None,None,None]
  time.sleep(delay) #in seconds
  return finList

And here is an example use of the function. It returns the formatted address, the latitude and the longitude.

#Example Use
test = r"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA"
geoR = GoogGeoAPI(address=test)
print geoR

This works for a few addresses without an API key. Even with an API key though the limit I believe is 2,500 – so don’t use this to geocode a large list. Also if you have some special characters in your address field this will take more work. For example if you have an & for an intersection I bet this url call will fail. But that should not be too hard to deal with. Also note the terms of service for using the API (which I don’t understand – so don’t ask me!)

I should eventually wrap up all of this google API python code into an extension for SPSS. Don’t hold your breath though for me getting the time to do that.

Here is an update for Python 3+ (the urllib library changed a bit). Also shows how to extract out the postal code.

#Update For Python 3+
#Also includes example parsing out the postal code
import urllib.request, urllib.parse 
import json, time
key = r'???!!!your key here!!!!????'

def GoogGeoAPI(address,api="",delay=3):
  base = r"https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?"
  addP = "address=" + urllib.parse.quote_plus(address)
  GeoUrl = base + addP + "&key=" + api
  response = urllib.request.urlopen(GeoUrl)
  jsonRaw = response.read()
  jsonData = json.loads(jsonRaw)
  if jsonData['status'] == 'OK':
    resu = jsonData['results'][0]
    post_code = -1
    for i in resu['address_components']:
      if i['types'][0] == 'postal_code':
        post_code = i['long_name'] #not sure if everything always has a long name?
    finList = [resu['formatted_address'],resu['geometry']['location']['lat'],resu['geometry']['location']['lng'],post_code]
  else:
    finList = [None,None,None,None]
  time.sleep(delay) #in seconds
  return finList
  
test = r"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA"
geoR = GoogGeoAPI(address=test,api=key,delay=0)
print(geoR)