This is a sponsored blog post by positionstack. All reviews and opinions expressed here are, however, based on my personal experience.
This is my third post about APIs created by apilayer. The other two were for scrapestack (for proxying any and all web requests) and serpstack (for getting search engine results in a quick and easy JSON format). I’ve really been impressed with the speed and ease of all of their products and positionstack is no exception, with full featured documentation on their product here.
Free text address query
The bread and butter of positionstack and what makes it especially easy to use is that it accepts free text queries. I tried multiple addresses and partial addresses, including my local walmart:
const baseUrl = `http://api.positionstack.com/v1`;
// Local Walmart
const query = '5001 N Ten';
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(`${baseUrl}/forward?access_key=${process.env.apiKey}&query=${query}&limit=1`);
console.log("axiosResponse.data", axiosResponse.data);
To which the response was very easily and quickly:
Very simple and super useful for when you want to verify an address. When web scraping I often find myself with something that I’m not quite sure is an address. There are a lot of different ways to format an address and so being able to take a small part of that address and convert it to a full one is INCREDIBLY useful.
For Cobalt Intelligence we are often trying to verify just the region, typically city and state. Let’s try something that we are pretty sure is a city but we aren’t quite sure where the city is located. Morrisville, in this example:
const baseUrl = `http://api.positionstack.com/v1`;
// Local Walmart
const query = 'morrisville';
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(`${baseUrl}/forward?access_key=${process.env.apiKey}&query=${query}&limit=1`);
console.log("axiosResponse.data", axiosResponse.data);
And the results?
A city in North Carolina, USA. VERIFIED!
More features!
All of the above is enough to make positionstack an awesome tool. But there are a lot more features that make it AMAZING.
How about timezone? Positionstack includes a module for that. Just pass a timezone_module=1 flag and it returns an additional object with the timezone of the location. Check it based on a church I used to frequent in Brazil:
// Church in Brazil
const query = 'Rua 9 A 199';
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(`${baseUrl}/forward?access_key=${process.env.apiKey}&query=${query}&limit=1&timezone_module=1`);
console.log("axiosResponse.data", axiosResponse.data, axiosResponse.data.data[0].timezone_module);
And the result?
Check that timezone_module at the bottom. She’s a beaut.
Another kind of neat module is the sun module, showing the rise and set time.
// Local Walmart
const query = '5001 N Ten';
// sun module
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(`${baseUrl}/forward?access_key=${process.env.apiKey}&query=${query}&limit=1&sun_module=1`);
console.log("axiosResponse.data", axiosResponse.data, new Date(axiosResponse.data.data[0].sun_module.rise.time * 1000));
Based on the above query, the sun will rise at 8:14am this morning where I am. Or at least, where my local walmart is.
And finally, a country module with a TON of information. I’m going to try it with our Brazilian address.
// Church in Brazil
const query = 'Rua 9 A 199';
// country module
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(`${baseUrl}/forward?access_key=${process.env.apiKey}&query=${query}&limit=1&country_module=1`);
console.log("axiosResponse.data", axiosResponse.data, axiosResponse.data.data[0].country_module);
The results of this returns:
Full details about the country, including language and even if the country is landlocked. In case you wanted to know that as well.
Em fim
Pricing for positionstack is very reasonable, with 25,000 requests a month allowed in their free plan. Check out the full pricing here. Currently it looks like this:
Overall, great product. Very fun and easy to use.
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