Telephone Number Geocoder

Want to map out a whole bunch of telephone numbers by their location?

That was my Sunday afternoon project. Inspired by @joshuabaer’s tweet looking for such service, decided to implement one just for fun today. Sorting through the data was fun, loads of wget, bash scripts to cut, awk, grep and process, python to mix and match, some php to whip out a interface, and sweet little mysql db to store it all.

It has a resolution per city using area code & prefix (123-123-….), and it turns out the US has a total of 155,972 unique geographically based telephone sectors.

You can feed it a list of phone numbers in any order, or even a chunk of text with phone numbers inside it and it will try it’s best to extract all the valid phone numbers. Valid formats include 1231231234, 123-123-1234, (123)123-1234, 123.123.1234, etc… yay for regular expressions.

I need to start using the google maps api more frequently, maybe next weekend project.

Update Dec 4, 2009

The Telmapper was taken down due to Abuse.