Python has a thriving ecosystem of third-party modules (i.e. libraries or packages) available for you to install. There are hundreds of thousands of such modules available for you to install and use.
Python comes with a package manager called pip. It can install all the packages listed at PyPI (Python Package Index). To install a package using pip, you need to run a command like following in a Terminal or CMD prompt.
pip install <package name>
For this course, we are using Anancoda platform - which comes with its own package manager called conda. You can use Anaconda Navigator to search and install packages. Or run the command like following in a Terminal or CMD Prompt.
conda install <package name>
See this comparison of pip and conda to understand the differences.
We have already installed the geopy package in our environment. geopy comes with functions that have already implemented many distance calculation formulae.
distance.great_circle(): Calculates the distance on a great circle using haversine formuladistance.geodesic(): Calculates the distance using a chosen ellipsoid using vincenty's formula
from geopy import distance
san_francisco = (37.7749, -122.4194)
new_york = (40.661, -73.944)
straight_line_distance = distance.great_circle(san_francisco, new_york)
ellipsoid_distance = distance.geodesic(san_francisco, new_york, ellipsoid='WGS-84')
print(straight_line_distance, ellipsoid_distance)Repeat the distance calculation exercise from the previous module but perform the calculation using the geopy library.
from geopy import distance
# city1 = (lat1, lng1)
# city2 = (lat2, lng2)
# call the geopy distance function and print the great circle and ellipsoid distance