Plot zip codes on US Map

Stegalex has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by dws (Chancellor) on Jul 01, 2002 at 19:15 UTC
I would like to plot the zip codes from my orders database against a U.S. State map as a means of graphically depicting where our customers are (for management). This problem breaks nicely into a couple of pieces: You'll need a mapping of zip codes to geographics coordinates. You'll need a graphic image of a map. You'll need a way to translate/scale geographic coordinates to map image coordinates. You'll need a way to composite images. You can find (1) by doing a bit of google searching. Finding (2) is a matter of looking around until you find a map image that you like. The only complication with (3) is dealing with Alaska and Hawaii if they appear as sidebars on the map, instead of in their "true" locations. (4) is easily handled by GD.	[reply]
Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by DamnDirtyApe (Curate) on Jul 01, 2002 at 19:15 UTC
Sounds like a good challenge! Zip Code Tabulation Areas that appear to give you lats & longs for zip codes. (Warning: 5MB text file.) As for the graphics, perhaps Image::Magick or Chart::GnuPlot, though someone who's done more graphics in Perl would know better. Hope that helps some. _______________ D a m n D i r t y A p e Home Node \| Email	[reply]
(jeffa) Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by jeffa (Bishop) on Jul 01, 2002 at 19:16 UTC
WWW::MapBlast sounds like a good starting point. This module will give you the latitude and longitude of a given zip code. Next step would be to use a module like GD to apply the zip codes. I would try some kind of World to Viewport algorithm to do so. It has been a long time since i did any graphics programming, last time was in Java. You can find my explanation on World to Viewport here (which is paraphrased from the book Computer Graphics). Remember also that jcwren has already done ~~this~~ something very similar at the Big Monk Map. jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by maverick (Curate) on Jul 01, 2002 at 19:16 UTC
A site like http://www.zipinfo.com can translate zip codes into long. / lat. You'll have to feed the form with LWP::Simple or maybe LWP::UserAgent and then extract the data with HTML::Parser. I'd then /msg jcwren and ask nicely for the code from his stats page that plots the locations of various Perl Monks using long. / lat. /\/\averick OmG! They killed tilly! You bleep!!	[reply]
Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by cacharbe (Curate) on Jul 01, 2002 at 19:21 UTC
Personally, I would get a list of Zip / Long-Lat pairs and use the coordinates as a starting source to plot them on a map, and then maybe talk with jcwren about how he created the Big Monk Map functionality on his website. And if you want to find the distances between them, check here to see the differences in some of the algorithms. C-. --- Flex the Geek	[reply]
Re: Plot zip codes on US Map by greenFox (Vicar) on Jul 02, 2002 at 02:53 UTC
Its been a while and I don't have the code at hand but I have done something similar using a Perl Tk canvas object. By using Northings & Eastings instead of Lat/Long I was able to plot as x-y points. I had data available in Northing Easting format and if I recall correctly it was all within the one zone. Geography::CoCo man page (not on CPAN that I could see) will convert Lat/Lon to Northing/Easting (or grid) format. -- my $chainsaw = 'Perl';	[reply]