UKPC

ukpc is a Python module that parses United Kingdom postcode strings into constituent parts:

• area
• district
• sector
• unit

Install:

pip install ukpc

Python 3.5 or greater is required. There are no dependencies outside the standard library.

Usage:

>>> from ukpc import PostCode
pc = PostCode('NW3 2RR')
>>> str(pc)
'area=NW, district=3, sector=2, unit=RR'

You can get parts with properties as expected. We also provide PostCode.farea, PostCode.fdistrict, PostCode.fsector, PostCode.funit properties. Some people refer to sector as the cumulative postcode up to and including sector rather than just the sector number:

>>> pc.sector
'2'
>>> pc.fsector
'NW3 2'

farea and area are the same. funit is the input string, the full postcode.

There is not too much validation and no reformatting of postcodes! An exception will be thrown if the parser can't parse the string. The parser expects well-formed, upper-case strings as input. If you want to validate or format postcodes, there are some other projects that appear to do this well:

https://github.com/andersonbispo/ukpcode

https://github.com/hamstah/ukpostcodeparser/blob/master/ukpostcodeparser/parser.py

We also provide a utility for reading a file of postcodes. The file is expected to be csv and the first column only is read as a well-formed, upper-case postcode.

from ukpc.utils import iterate_file
iterate_file(path, callback=store_pc_in_database)

callback is any callable that you must provide. This will cause store_pc_in_database() to be called with a PostCode instance.

There is also a command line util that calls iterate_file():

(.env)➜  ukpc python -m ukpc.utils postcodes.csv  --stats
time in secs: 27
areas: 123
districts: 3089
sectors: 12302
units: 401

Get a list of all postcodes with geo information here:

https://www.doogal.co.uk/PostcodeDownloads.php

We follow this specification:

https://www.mrs.org.uk/pdf/postcodeformat.pdf

Testing

pip install pytest
cd ukpc
pytest test.py --verbose

or

python3 ukpc/test.py