U.S. Census Bureau Batch Geocoder

README.md

U.S. Census Bureau Batch Geocoder

Demonstrates how to make a batch geocoding service request to the U.S. Census Bureau (more info in their API docs).

Before you try this...

You need a stable connection to the internet.

The curl command-line tool must be installed and available on your PATH (more info here).

Note the provided example input file, which you can overwrite for your own purposes.

Other important notes from the API docs:

CSV formatted files should have an extension ending in .CSV, .TXT, .DAT, and Excel files should have an extension ending in .XLS, or .XLSX. The file needs to be included as part of the HTTP request.

If a component is missing from the dataset, it must still retain the delimited format with a null value. Unique ID and Street address are required fields.

If there are commas that are part of one of the fields, the whole field needs to be enclosed in quote marks for proper parsing.

There is currently an upper limit of 10,000 records per batch file.

address_batch.csv

cb_geocoder_results.csv.sh

curl \
	--form addressFile=@address_batch.csv \
	--form benchmark=4 \
	https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/locations/addressbatch \
	--output cb_geocode_batch.csv