Python module for getting latitude and longitude from the name of a US city

Question

I am looking for a python module which can take in the name of the city as the input and return the latitude and longitude of the input.

Answer 1

An example:

from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim
geolocator = Nominatim(user_agent='myapplication')
location = geolocator.geocode("Chicago Illinois")
print(location.address)

Available info:

>>> location.raw
{u'display_name': u'Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, United States of America', u
'importance': 1.0026476104889, u'place_id': u'97957568', u'lon': u'-87.6243706',
 u'lat': u'41.8756208', u'osm_type': u'relation', u'licence': u'Data \xa9 OpenSt
reetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright', u'osm_i
d': u'122604', u'boundingbox': [u'41.6439170837402', u'42.0230255126953', u'-87.
9401016235352', u'-87.5239791870117'], u'type': u'city', u'class': u'place', u'i
con': u'http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/images/mapicons/poi_place_city.p.20.p
ng'}

Answer 2

You can also use geocoder with Bing Maps API. The API gets latitude and longitude data for all addresses for me (unlike Nominatim) and it has a pretty good free version for non-commercial uses (max 125000 requests per year for free). To get free API, go here and click "Get a free Basic key". After getting your API, you can use it in the code below:

import geocoder # pip install geocoder
g = geocoder.bing('Tokyo', key='<API KEY>')
results = g.json
print(results['lat'], results['lng'])

Output:

>>> 35.68696212768555 139.7494659423828

The results contains much more information than longitude and latitude. Check it out.