Installation

geonames requires Python 2.7 or 3.5+ as well as numpy and pandas packages. It can be installed with,

pip install geonames

Usage

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