I’ve recently started looking into geocoding in perl. We’re currently using some old hand-coded logic to query the Yahoo Search API. I wanted to switch to Geo::Coder::Yahoo but I noticed that that depended on Yahoo::Search which hadn’t been updated since March 2007 and had accumulated a number of bug reports (which may well be closed by the time you read this).

Several related to the fact that Yahoo::Search didn’t handle Unicode properly when using its default internal XML parser (instead of the optional XML::Simple which does the right thing, but slowly).

What happened next makes a nice little example of getting things done in the Open Source world… Continue reading →