US: The Greatest Package in the World

A package for easily working with US and state metadata.

• all US states and territories
• postal abbreviations
• Associated Press style abbreviations
• FIPS codes
• capitals
• years of statehood
• time zones
• phonetic state name lookup
• is contiguous or continental
• URLs to shapefiles for state, census, congressional districts, counties, and census tracts

Installation

As per usual:

pip install us

Features

Easy access to state information:

>>> import us
>>> us.states.MD
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.MD.fips
'24'
>>> us.states.MD.name
'Maryland'
>>> us.states.MD.is_contiguous
True

Includes territories too:

>>> us.states.VI.name
'Virgin Islands'
>>> us.states.VI.is_territory
True
>>> us.states.MD.is_territory
False

List of all (actual) states:

>>> us.states.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...
>>> us.states.TERRITORIES
[<State:American Samoa>, <State:Guam>, <State:Northern Mariana Islands>, ...

And the whole shebang, if you want it:

>>> us.states.STATES_AND_TERRITORIES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:American Samoa>, ...

For convenience, STATES, TERRITORIES, and STATES_AND_TERRITORIES can be accessed directly from the us module:

>>> us.states.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...
>>> us.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...

Some states like to be fancy and call themselves commonwealths:

>>> us.states.COMMONWEALTHS
[<State:Kentucky>, <State:Massachusetts>, <State:Pennsylvania>, <State:Virginia>]

There's also a list of obsolete territories:

>>> us.states.OBSOLETE
[<State:Dakota>, <State:Orleans>, <State:Philippine Islands>]

The state lookup method allows matching by FIPS code, abbreviation, and name:

>>> us.states.lookup('24')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('MD')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('md')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('maryland')
<State:Maryland>

Get useful information:

>>> state = us.states.lookup('maryland')
>>> state.abbr
'MD'

And for those days that you just can't remember how to spell Mississippi, we've got phonetic name matching too:

>>> us.states.lookup('misisipi')
<State:Mississippi>

Shapefiles

You want shapefiles too? As long as you want 2010 shapefiles, we've gotcha covered.

>>> urls = us.states.MD.shapefile_urls()
>>> sorted(urls.keys())
['block', 'blockgroup', 'cd', 'county', 'state', 'tract', 'zcta']
>>> urls['block']
'https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TABBLOCK/2010/tl_2010_24_tabblock10.zip'

The shapefile_urls() method on the State object generates shapefile URLs for the following regions:

• block
• blockgroup
• census tract (tract)
• congressional district (cd)
• county
• state
• zcta

Mappings

Mappings between various state attributes are a common need. The mapping() method will generate a lookup between two specified fields.

>>> us.states.mapping('fips', 'abbr')
{'01': 'AL', '02': 'AK', '04': 'AZ', '05': 'AR', '06': 'CA', ...
>>> us.states.mapping('abbr', 'name')
{'AL': 'Alabama', 'AK': 'Alaska', 'AZ': 'Arizona', 'AR': 'Arkansas', ...

This method uses us.STATES_AND_TERRITORIES as the default list of states it will create a mapping for, but this can be overridden by passing an additional states argument:

>>> us.states.mapping('fips', 'abbr', states=[us.states.DC])
{'11': 'DC'}

DC should be granted statehood

Washington, DC does not appear in us.STATES or any of the related state lists, but is often treated as a state in practice and should be granted statehood anyway. DC can be automatically included in these lists by setting a DC_STATEHOOD environment variable to any truthy value before importing this package.

DC_STATEHOOD=1

CLI

When you need to know state information RIGHT AWAY, there's the states script.

$ states md

*** The great state of Maryland (MD) ***

  FIPS code: 24

  other attributes:
    ap_abbr: Md.
    capital: Annapolis
    capital_tz: America/New_York
    is_contiguous: True
    is_continental: True
    is_obsolete: False
    name_metaphone: MRLNT
    statehood_year: 1788
    time_zones: America/New_York

  shapefiles:
    tract: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TRACT/2010/tl_2010_24_tract10.zip
    cd: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/CD/111/tl_2010_24_cd111.zip
    county: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/COUNTY/2010/tl_2010_24_county10.zip
    state: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/STATE/2010/tl_2010_24_state10.zip
    zcta: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/ZCTA5/2010/tl_2010_24_zcta510.zip
    block: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TABBLOCK/2010/tl_2010_24_tabblock10.zip
    blockgroup: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/BG/2010/tl_2010_24_bg10.zip

Running Tests

GitHub Actions are set up to automatically run unit tests against any new commits to the repo. To run these tests yourself:

pipenv install --dev
pipenv run pytest

Changelog

3.1.1

• add support for Python 3.11
• upgrade to jellyfish 0.11.2

3.0.0

• upgrade to jellyfish 0.7.2
• drop support for Python 2.7
• add us.states.COMMONWEALTHS list of states that call themselves commonwealths 🎩
• add DC to STATES, STATES_AND_TERRITORIES, STATES_CONTIGUOUS, or STATES_CONTINENTAL when DC_STATEHOOD environment variable is set
• remove region parameter from shapefile_urls() method
• mapping() no longer includes obsolete states
• added type annotations

2.0.2

• restore DC in lookup() and mapping()

2.0.1

• fix Python 2.7 tests that ran with Python 3
• revert to jellyfish 0.6.1 to support Python 2.7

2.0.0

• add support for Python 3.7 and 3.8
• remove support for Python 3.4 and 3.5
• remove pickled objects and database in favor of pure Python code
• upgrade jellyfish to 0.7.2 to fix metaphone bug
• fixes for IN, KY, ND, and NM timezones
• set AZ timezone to America/Phoenix
• obsolete entries are no longer included in STATES_AND_TERRITORIES
• DC is no longer included in STATES, STATES_AND_TERRITORIES, STATES_CONTIGUOUS, or STATES_CONTINENTAL

1.0.0

• full Python 3.6 support
• use pytest

0.10.0

• upgrade jellyfish to 0.5.3 to fix metaphone bug

0.9.0

• add information on whether a state is contiguous and/or continental, thanks to chebee7i

0.8.0

• add obsolete territories, thanks to Ben Chartoff
• fix packaging error, thanks to Alexander Kulakov

0.7.1

• upgrade to jellyfish 0.5.1 to fix metaphone case bug

0.7

• add time zones, thanks to Paul Tagliamonte
• Python 2.6 and 3.2 compatibility

0.6

• add AP-style state abbreviations
• use jellyfish instead of Metaphone package
• update to requests v1.0.4 for tests
• Python 3.3 compatibility

0.5

• fix state abbreviation for Nebraska

0.4

• add state capitals
• add years of statehood

0.3

• add mapping method to generate dicts of arbitrary fields

0.2

• add command line script for quick access to state data

0.1

• initial release
• state names and abbreviations
• FIPS codes
• lookup() method
• shapefile URLs for various regions