tommy's scratchpad

When looking for phone numbers for various churches, I thought wouldn’t it be neat to put the locations on a map?

Python to the rescue.  After some scraping to generate a CSV listing, I geocoded the addresses, then I used the OGR to convert into a KML document, using the same approach I previously blogged about.  Nice!

Looking deeper, I wanted to have more exhaustive content within the <description> element.  Turns out ogr2ogr has a -dsco DescriptionField=fieldname option, but I wanted more than that.  So I decided to hack the original CSV:

#!/usr/bin/python

import csv
import urllib2
import urllib
from lxml import etree

r = csv.reader(open('greek_churches_canada.csv'))

node = etree.Element('kml', nsmap={None: 'http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2'})

r.next()

for row in r:
    params = '%s,%s,%s,%s' % (row[1], row[2], row[3], row[4])
    url = 'http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?output=csv&q=%s' % urllib.quote_plus(params)
    #print url
    content = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    status, accuracy, lat, lon = content.read().split(',')
    #print status, accuracy, lat, lon
    if status == '200':
        row.append(lat)
        row.append(lon)
        subnode = etree.Element('Placemark')
        subsubnode = etree.Element('name')
        subsubnode.text = row[0]
        subsubnode2 = etree.Element('description')
        description = '<p>'
        description += '%s<br/>' % row[1]
        description += '%s, %s<br/>' % (row[2], row[3])
        description += '%s<br/>' % row[4]
        if row[5] != 'none':
            description += '%s<br/>' % row[5]
        if row[6] != 'none':
            description += '%s<br/>' % row[6]
        if row[7] != 'none':
            description += '<a href="%s">Website</a><br/>' % row[7]
        if row[8] != 'none':
            description += '<a href="mailto:%s">Email</a><br/>' % row[8]
        description += '%s<br/>' % row[9]
        description += '</p>'
        subsubnode2.text = etree.CDATA(description)
        subsubnode3 = etree.Element('Point')
        subsubsubnode = etree.Element('coordinates')
        subsubsubnode.text = '%s, %s' %(lon, lat)
        subsubnode3.append(subsubsubnode)
        subnode.append(subsubnode)
        subnode.append(subsubnode2)
        subnode.append(subsubnode3)
        node.append(subnode)
print etree.tostring(node, xml_declaration=True, encoding='UTF-8', pretty_print=True)

I wonder whether an OGR -dsco DescriptionTemplate=foo.txt, where foo.txt would look like:

<table>

 <tr>

  <th>City</th>

  <td>[city]</td>

  <th>Province</th>

  <td>[province]</td>

 </tr>

</table>

Or anything the user specified, for that matter.  Then OGR would then use for each feature’s <description> element.

Anyways, here’s the resulting map.  Cool!