Getting started

The library is very straight forward, at the very top of the library there is country which is tanzania and at the very bottoms are places in a given street and you access the locations as attributes just as shown in the example below;

Example

>>> from mtaa import tanzania

>>> tanzania

['Shinyanga', 'Mara', 'Dar-es-salaam', 'Kilimanjaro', 'Kagera', 'Tanga', 'Mwanza', 'Tabora', 'Kigoma', 'Pwani', 'Ruvuma', 'Mtwara', 'Morogoro', 'Rukwa', 'Katavi', 'Simiyu', 'Geita', 'Arusha', 'Iringa', 'Mbeya', 'Njombe', 'Manyara', 'Lindi', 'Singida', 'Songwe', 'Dodoma']

>>> tanzania.Mbeya.districts

['Mbeya cbd', 'Mbeya', 'Rungwe', 'Mbarali', 'Kyela', 'Chunya]

>>> tanzania.Mbeya.districts.Rungwe.wards

['ward_post_code', 'Bulyaga', 'Bagamoyo', 'Makandana', 'Msasani', 'Kawetele', 'Itagata', 'Ibigi', 'Kyimo', 'Suma', 'Masoko', 'Mpuguso', 'Malindo', 'Lufingo', 'Kiwira', 'Nkunga', 'Ikuti', 'Kisondela', 'Ilima', 'Bujela', 'Masukulu', 'Kisiba', 'Kabula', 'Lupata', 'Kambasegela', 'Kisegese', 'Itete', 'Lufilyo', 'Lwangwa', 'Mpombo', 'Isange', 'Kandete', 'Luteba', 'Isongole', 'Kinyala', 'Matwebe', 'Masebe', 'Swaya', 'Iponjola', 'Lupepo', 'Ndanto', 'Ntaba', 'Mpata']

How about Dar-es-salaam ?

In the above example we were able to retreive locations of Mbeya region because, Mbeya is a valid python identifier, when you try to access Dar-es-Salaam it will ofcourse raise you an error just as shown below;

>>> from mtaa import tanzania

>>> tanzania.Dar-es-salaam

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

AttributeError: 'Tanzania' object has no attribute 'Dar'

To resolve this at anypoint where you a location name is an invalid identifier, use get_dict() instead of (.) operator to access it as shown in the example below;

>>> from mtaa import tanzania

>>> tanzania.get('Dar-es-salaam').districts

['Ilala cbd', 'Ilala', 'Kinondoni', 'Temeke', 'Ubungo', 'Kigamboni']

Types ?

Since we can access the attributes by locations it obviously the tanzania is an Abstract data type (ADT) implemented using a class, we can see this by using python builtin functionality type();

>>> from mtaa import tanzania

>>> type(tanzania)

<class 'mtaa.Tanzania'>

In many cases you will want those locations to be in standard types whether that a list, tuple, or set to easy manipulate and interact with them as build an application but how ?

tip

tanzania object is iterable, that's means you can easy convert locations at any level location into any iterable standard type whether that be a list, set or a tuple just as shown in the example below;

>>> from mtaa import tanzania

>>> dar = tanzania.get('Dar-es-salaam').districts

>>> type(dar)

<class 'mtaa.Tanzania'>

>>> list(dar)

['Ilala cbd', 'Ilala', 'Kinondoni', 'Temeke', 'Ubungo', 'Kigamboni']

>>> set(dar)

{'Temeke', 'Kinondoni', 'Ilala', 'Ilala cbd', 'Kigamboni', 'Ubungo'}

>>> tuple(dar)

('Ilala cbd', 'Ilala', 'Kinondoni', 'Temeke', 'Ubungo', 'Kigamboni')

Looping over locations

As we have seen that since mtaa.Tanzania is an iterable, then thats means we can also loop through it.

note

When we loop over a Mtaa.Tanzania , we are looping the locations as strings not objects, here an example on what I mean;

>>> for district in tanzania.Mbeya.districts:

... print(type(district))

...

<class 'str'>

<class 'str'>

.............

If were to find the all the district in Mbeya that starts with R, our code is going to look like this;

>>> for ds in tanzania.Mbeya.districts:

... if ds.startswith('R'):

... print(f'{ds} starts with R')

...

Rungwe starts with R

In the next chapter we will see how to use mtaa to retrieve grouped locations data so keep reading