Library to query places from GeoName dumps (http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/).
geonames requires Python 2.7 or 3.5+ as well as numpy and pandas packages. It can be installed with,
pip install geonames-lib
The best way to search for a specific location is to have a "filter" value and then the place's name. The filter will reduce the number of rows to check considerably. For example, when searching for a location in the US there are (currently) 2237584 entries. However, once a state is specified (e.g. West Virigina) the number drops down to 35932; 1/60th of the original number of rows.
import geonames
import io
import urllib.request as request
import zipfile
name = 'Bath(Berkeley Springs)' # (Berkeley Springs, West Virgina)
# Download US geonames dataset
US = request.urlopen('http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/US.zip')
zipfile = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(US.read()))
# Load data
geo = geonames.GeoNames(zipfile.open('US.txt'))
# Search with state specified (`admin1code` filters by state)
location = next(geo.search(name=name, admin1code='WV'))
print(location)Which (if all goes well) should output:
geonameid 4.7987e+06 name Berkeley Springs asciiname Berkeley Springs alternatenames Berkeley Spring,Berkeley Springs,Warm Springs latitude 39.6264 longitude -78.2292 featureclass H featurecode SPNG countrycode US countrycode2 NaN admin1code WV admin2code 065 admin3code NaN admin4code NaN population 0 elevation 185 dem 194 timezone America/New_York modificationdate 2011-12-12 certainty 86 Name: 741633, dtype: object