Geo::Fips55 - Perl extension for parsing FIPS-55 gazetteer data

  use Geo::Fips55;

  @records = Geo::Fips55->parse_file( $filehandle );

  Geo::Fips55->parse_file( $filehandle, \&callback );

  $record = Geo::Fips55->new( \%data );

  $record->state_fips();
  $record->place_fips();
  $record->state();
  $record->num_counties();
  $record->crsn();
  $record->class();
  $record->name();
  $record->county_fips();
  $record->county();
  $record->part_of();
  $record->other_name();
  $record->zip();
  $record->postal_match();
  $record->zip_range();
  $record->gsa();
  $record->mrf();
  $record->msa();
  $record->cd1(); # and so on up to cd14()

Geo::Fips55 provides a representation of the US Geological Survey FIPS-55 gazetteer format. Each object is one record. It also contains methods to parse FIPS-55 data files and turn them into objects.

This is intended as an intermediate format between pulling the raw data out of the simplistic FIPS-55 data files into something more sophisticated (a process you should only have to do once). As such, its not very fast, but its careful, easy to use and performs some verifications on the data being read.

This module subclasses Michael Schwern's very nice Geo::TigerLine modules to do all the heavy lifting.

This module wasn't automatically generated like the Geo::TigerLine::Record::* modules were. Probably it should have been, but the FIPS data record layout changes even less often than the TIGER data -- the last revision to the FIPS-55 spec was in 1994. If it ever gets revised, I will gladly update this module by hand.

You can learn more about the FIPS-55 standard and download the entire US geographic names database from http://geonames.usgs.gov/fips55.html.

Geo::TigerLine(3pm)

Schuyler D. Erle <schuyler@nocat.net>

Copyright (C) 2004 by Schuyler D. Erle

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.3 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.