Gets search results from Google Maps for the given string

mapsearch.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Gets search results from Google Maps for the given string.

Usage:
    mapsearch.py "address" [region]
    
Regions are two-character ccTLDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcTLD
They're not validated by this script
"""

import sys
import urllib

try:
    import json
except:
    import simplejson as json

GMAPS_URL = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?'

def gmaps_address_search(s, region=None):
    query = {
        'address': s,
        'sensor': 'false',
    }
    if region:
        query['region'] = region
    
    url = GMAPS_URL + urllib.urlencode(query)
    print >>sys.stderr, url
    response = urllib.urlopen(url)
    if response.code != 200:
        raise RuntimeError("Server returned bad response (%d):\n%s" % (response.code, response.read()))
    
    data = json.loads(response.read())
    
    return data['results']
    

def main():
    s = sys.argv[1]
    region = None
    if len(sys.argv) > 2:
        region = sys.argv[2]
    for result in gmaps_address_search(s, region=region):
        latlng = result['geometry']['location']
        latlng = latlng['lat'], latlng['lng']
        print '%s:\n\t%4f, %4f\n' % (result['formatted_address'], latlng[1], latlng[0])

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()