NAME
WWW::Gazetteer - Find location of world towns and cities
SYNOPSYS
use WWW::Gazetteer;
my $g = WWW::Gazetteer->new('FallingRain');
my @londons = $g->find('London', 'UK');
my $london = $londons[0];
print $london->{longitude}, ", ", $london->{latitude}, "\n";
DESCRIPTION
A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary (as at the back of an atlas).
The "WWW::Gazetteer" module is a generic interface to the
"WWW::Gazetteer::*" modules which can return geographical location
(longitude, latitude, elevation) for towns and cities in countries in
the world.
This is a factory module which dispatches to one of the many
"WWW::Gazetteer::*" modules. This provides a simple interface and lets
the subclasses actually provide the communication to the online
gazetteers. You may think of this as the DBI and the subclasses as the
DBDs.
Valid subclasses as of this release are: "WWW::Gazetteer::FallingRain",
"WWW::Gazetteer::Getty" and "WWW::Gazetteer::HeavensAbove". To create a
gazetteer object, pass the name of the subclass as the first argument to
new:
my $g = WWW::Gazetteer->new('FallingRain');
my $g2 = WWW::Gazetteer->new('Getty');
my $g3 = WWW::Gazetteer->new('HeavensAbove');
Calling find($town, $country) will return a list of hashrefs with the
country, town, longitude, and latitude information. Additional
information such as elevation may also be available. You should check
the documentation of your subclass for the particular features that it
supports.
my @londons = $g->find('London', 'UK');
my $london = $londons[0];
print $london->{longitude}, ", ", $london->{latitude}, "\n";
# prints -0.1167, 51.5000
METHODS
new()
This returns a new WWW::Gazetteer::* object. It has one argument, the
name of the subclass (and optionally configuration for the subclass):
use WWW::Gazetteer;
my $g = WWW::Gazetteer->new('FallingRain');
find()
The find method looks up geographical information and returns it to you.
It takes in a city and a country, with the recommended syntax being te
city name and ISO 3166 country code.
Note that there may be more than one town or city with that name in the
country. You will get a list of hashrefs for each town/city.
my @londons = $g->find("London", "UK");
Check the documentation of your subclass for which countries, which
syntax it supports, and what information it returns.
SEE ALSO
WWW::Gazetteer::FallingRain, WWW::Gazetteer::Getty,
WWW::Gazetteer::HeavensAbove.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2002-5, Leon Brocard
This module is free software; you can redistribute it or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.
AUTHOR
Leon Brocard,
[email protected]. Thanks to Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat.
