Postcode X,Y co-ordinates

Altered Corpse · 16 Feb 2006 at 08:26

I'm trying to get the X,Y co-ordinates of UK postcodes so i can work out the distance between two locations but i can't seem to find anywhere that has it available for download. Jibble (www.jibble.org) are supposed to have one but it doesn't appear to be available for download anymore. I'm also aware samknows provide an XML service but ideally i don't want to have to rely on an external service. Does anyone know somewhere else that has it available for download?

Thanks

Space Cowboy · 16 Feb 2006 at 09:07

I saw a Perl library for it once, but I can't help more than that!

Altered Corpse · 17 Feb 2006 at 04:00

Thanks but i just went ahead and implemented it using the samknows XML service in the end. It certainly puts quite an overhead on the system having to do all the HTTP requests but it's only for a uni project so i've left it as that.

Moredhel · 17 Feb 2006 at 08:29

The Royal Mail provides a giant CSV of it. But it's not free.

Altered Corpse · 17 Feb 2006 at 12:05

Moredhel said:
The Royal Mail provides a giant CSV of it. But it's not free.

Thanks. Obviously i don't want to pay for it for university work but i'll put that in my write-up as a solution to the problem. Cheers.

Diskbox · 17 Feb 2006 at 14:29

AC what exactly are you doing? i was trying to do a similar thing for my uni project, what are you using? google maps? multimap, i might be able to help you out.

Diskbox · 17 Feb 2006 at 14:40

i dont know if what i`ve done is allowed or not, i emailed multimap, but they havent reposnded, i explained it was for a uni project.

Space Cowboy · 17 Feb 2006 at 15:36

Quick search said...

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=45713

Link at the bottom.

Altered Corpse · 17 Feb 2006 at 17:35

Diskbox said:
AC what exactly are you doing? i was trying to do a similar thing for my uni project, what are you using? google maps? multimap, i might be able to help you out.

I've created a classified car advert website for my final year project. When the user searches for a car it returns the distance they are from the car using pythagoras theorem. The problem with the way the post code search is currently implemented using the samknows XML service means it's taking up to 30 seconds to return the results. See for yourself:

http://adcock82.plus.com:81/project/carWebSite/search.aspx (all cars will return the same distance as they were placed by the same person).

Space cowboy, thanks very much.

I'll ask my supervisor when i see him next if it's worth changing.

Pine · 17 Feb 2006 at 18:08

Space Cowboy said:
Quick search said...

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=45713

Link at the bottom.

Did a quick diff on this against what the Perl Module Geo:

ostcode uses. They're essentially identical. This looks to me to be the best/fastest/easiest way of doing what you want.

Diskbox · 17 Feb 2006 at 20:06

well i`ve managed to scrape the lat and long form a postcode search on multmap, then linking that to my database and thne onto my gogole map.