Comments on: Using Geocoders with GeoDjango

By: Chris Amico

Chris Amico — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:49:48 +0000

Here’s how I’ve mostly done it (using Geopy, which has the same issue):

def geocode(q):
place, (lat, lng) = g.geocode(‘somewhere’)
return Point(lng, lat)

I do like Simon’s fix, though.

By: Derek

Derek — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:02:08 +0000

Thanks, Simon! I think yours is the most flexible solution for everybody. And I’m not a real geo-nerd either; just someone who gets to look good thanks to GeoDjango.

Aaron – yeah, you could, sure. I guess it just looked cleaner to me the other way.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:47:58 +0000

As you say, it’s not a huge deal — and I’m not opposed to forking for minor changes — but would it be easier to just do:

pnt = Point(results[1][::-1])

By: Simon Willison

Simon Willison — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:36:55 +0000

I’m clearly not a real geo-nerd, because I’ve always found longitude/latitude ordering unintuitive. You’re right though, it’s silly not to support the format used by GeoDjango. I’ve just committed a fix for this, which changes the API to look like this:

>>> from geocoders.google import geocoder
>>> geocode = geocoder(‘GOOGLE-API-KEY’, lonlat=True)
>>> results = geocode(‘new york’)
(u’New York, NY, USA’, (-73.986951000000005, 40.756053999999999))
>>> pnt = Point(results[1])

As you can see, the default order remains the same (partly to ensure backwards compatibility for existing library users, but mainly because I prefer it) but you can now specify the order you want when you instantiate the geocoder – which you hopefully only do in one place in your code.

Here’s the commit: http://github.com/simonw/geocoders/commit/46fc00bda4cff0fe222d38fe498aa9ba861e8dc1