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Make Dictionary Of US Cities
"""
Reads the data from http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html and finds the cities by state.
It produces a dictionary with the two letter state codes as keys. For each key there is
a list of dictionaries each with info on a city.
"""
def process(sline):
d={'state': sline[0:2],\
'city':sline[9:73].strip(),\
'population':int(sline[73:82]),\
'housing':int(sline[82:91]),\
'land_area':float(sline[119:131]),\
'water_area':float(sline[131:143]),\
'latitude':float(sline[143:153]),\
'longitude':float(sline[153:164]),\
'city_type':''}
for t in ['(balance)','city','CDP','town','borough','village','comunidad','municipality','zona urbana']:
idx = d['city'].rfind(t)
if (idx>-1):
d['city']=d['city'][0:idx-1]
d['city_type']=t
break
return d
print "Reading data..."
import urllib
import codecs
text_file=codecs.getreader('latin_1')( urllib.urlopen('http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/places2k.txt'))
lines=text_file.readlines()
citiesByState = {}
for city_line in lines:
if len(city_line) > 0 :
thisCity = process(city_line)
citiesByState.setdefault(thisCity['state'],[]).append(thisCity)
print "US census data has been read"
# Pickle it
import pickle
fp=open('us_cities.pickle','wb')
pickle.dump(citiesByState,fp)
fp.close()
