My Sunday evening project: Geocoding with Folium and OpenCage

I had played with Folium a while back and recently started looking at OpenCage, so I though it would be great to use the two together to put markers on a global map based on natural language queries. It really wasn’t too difficult at all and I ended up with a neat little tool.

You can see an iPython notebook preview here. There’s also a simple command-line driver:

$ ./map_marker.py -h
usage: map_marker.py [-h] [-z ZOOM] [-k KEY] input output

Given a list of location queries, mark the locations on a Folium
(https://github.com/python-visualization/folium) map via the OpenCage
(https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/) geocoder service

positional arguments:
  input                 a file with a list of queries (one query per line; use
                        "-" to read queries from stdin)
  output                a file where a folio.Map map will be written as HTML

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -z ZOOM, --zoom ZOOM  starting zoom level (default: 0)
  -k KEY, --key KEY     your OpenCage API key (get a key here:
                        https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/users/sign_up)
                        (default: None)

E.g.:

$ echo "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500, U.S." | ./map_marker.py - whitehouse.html