oscodepoint 0.2

A Python interface to Ordnance Survey's CodePoint-Open data

An interface to Ordnance Survey’s CodePoint-Open. CodePoint-Open is a free dataset that maps UK postcodes to coordinates.

oscodepoint reads in this data, whether in the original zip or decompressed, parses the data, and converts grid references to latitude and longitude.

The dataset can be downloaded from http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/code-point-open/

Example:

>>> from oscodepoint import open_codepoint
>>> codepoint = open_codepoint('codepo_gb.zip')
>>> for entry in codepoint.entries():
...    print entry['Postcode'], entry['Latitude'], entry['Longitude']
...    break  # Over 1.6 million rows
AB101AA 57.1482995075 -2.09663094048

Too much data? Try limiting the postcode areas:

>>> from oscodepoint import open_codepoint
>>> codepoint = open_codepoint('codepo_gb.zip')
>>> for entry in codepoint.entries(areas=['NR', 'IP']):
...    print entry['Postcode'], entry['Eastings'], entry['Northings']
...    break
NR1 1AA 624068 308352

Want the postcode’s county?

Postcode entries have a Admin_country_code field. Doc/Codelist.xls maps these codes to county names, and codepoint.codelist can be used to access this file. For example:

>>> from oscodepoint import open_codepoint
>>> codepoint = open_codepoint('codepo_gb.zip')
>>> county_list = codepoint.codelist['County']
>>> for entry in codepoint.entries(areas=['NR']):
...    print entry['Postcode'], entry['Latitude'], entry['Longitude'], county_list.get(entry['Admin_county_code'])
...    break
NR1 1AA 52.6266175146 1.30932087485 Norfolk County

Get the total number of postcodes for your progress bar:

>>> from oscodepoint import open_codepoint
>>> codepoint = open_codepoint('codepo_gb.zip')
>>> print codepoint.metadata['area_counts']['NR']
22730
>>> print codepoint.metadata['total_count']
1692241