Question

I have csv file having some address data mostly in Finnish language. I need to read that file and getting some geocode information of these address. But It doesn’t work for Finnish alphabet and says it cant read those! Can anybody please help me out of this?

import urllib,urllib2,time

addr_file = 'address.csv'
out_file = 'addresses_geocoded.csv'
out_file_failed = 'failed.csv'
sleep_time = 2
root_url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?"
gkey = "asfasdfasdfasdf"       # not an actual value
return_codes = {'200':'SUCCESS',
                         '400':'BAD REQUEST',
                         '500':'SERVER ERROR',
                         '601':'MISSING QUERY',
                         '602':'UNKOWN ADDRESS',
                         '603':'UNAVAILABLE ADDRESS',
                         '604':'UNKOWN DIRECTIONS',
                         '610':'BAD KEY',
                         '620':'TOO MANY QUERIES'

                         }
def geocode_for_musiquitous(addr_file,out_fmt='csv'):
        #encode our dictionary of url parameters
        values = {'q' : addr_file, 'output':out_fmt, 'key':gkey}
        data = urllib.urlencode(values)
        #set up our request
        url = root_url+data
        req = urllib2.Request(url)
        #make request and read response
        response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
        geodat = response.read().split(',')
        response.close()

        # this section is just handle the data returned from google
        code = return_codes[geodat[0]]
        if code == 'SUCCESS':
                code,precision,lat,lng = geodat
                return {'code':code,'precision':precision,'lat':lat,'lng':lng}
        else:
                return {'code':code}

def main():
#open  i/o files
        outf = open(out_file,'w')
        outf_failed = open(out_file_failed,'w')
        inf = open(addr_file,'r')
        for address in inf:
            #get latitude and longitude of address
                data = geocode_for_musiquitous(address)


            #output results and log to file



                if len(data)>1:
                        print "Latitude and Longitude of "+address+":"
                        print "\tLatitude:",data['lat']
                        print "\tLongitude:",data['lng']
                        outf.write(address.strip()+data['lat']+','+data['lng']+'\n')
                        outf.flush()
                else:
                        print "Geocoding of '"+addr_file+"' failed with error code "+data['code']
                        outf_failed.write(address)


                        outf_failed.flush()

                time.sleep(sleep_time)

                #clean up
        inf.close()
        outf.close()
        outf_failed.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
        main()

Answer 1

The argument of urllib.url should be UTF-8 encoded beforehand:

addr_file = addr_file.encode("utf-8")
values = {'q' : addr_file, 'output':out_fmt, 'key':gkey}
data = urllib.urlencode(values)

And make sure you open the CSV file with the correct encoding (might be “windows-1252” or “iso-8859-1”):

inf = codecs.open(addr_file, 'r', 'iso-8859-1')