gridpin

Read the sheet directly: list, export, slice

Sometimes the question is not where an address is, but which addresses there are: every house on a street, every address in a postcode, a small file for one town.

New Use the data itself Command line Research

What you have

The country file. Nothing else.

Steps

1. List the houses of a street, as you would write it, with a town or postcode:

terminalCLI
$ gridpin list usa.bin --street "S Wacker Dr" --city Chicago --limit 5
# license: mixed permissive: U.S. Government work (17 U.S.C. §105), NYC Open Data (Admin Code §23-502), CC0 1.0, PDDL 1.0, CC BY 4.0, open data terms of Los Angeles County, Oakland County, MassGIS, MnGeo, Oregon GEOHub
# attribution: National Address Database (USDOT) and state and county open data, datasets: NAD, us/ma/statewide, us/ca/los_angeles, us/mn/statewide, us/or/statewide, us/ny/city_of_new_york, us/fl/hillsborough, us/ca/sacramento, us/mi/oakland, us/ca/fresno, us/ga/dekalb, us/ca/san_francisco, us/fl/manatee, us/id/ada, us/la/city_of_new_orleans, us/pa/lackawanna, us/ga/clarke, us/ca/napa, us/ca/nevada, us/wi/waupaca; via Overture Maps / OpenAddresses, release 2026-09-23.1; address normalization applied; partial coverage (sources with an explicit right to redistribute); settlement names © GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
lat,lon,street,housenumber,postcode,commune,region
41.8815503,-87.6361451,South WACKER Drive,1,60606,Chicago,
41.8815994,-87.6375114,South WACKER Drive,10,60606,Chicago,
41.8809021,-87.6375109,South WACKER Drive,30,60606,Chicago,
41.8809885,-87.6360339,South WACKER Drive,71,60606,Chicago,
41.8803866,-87.6374866,South WACKER Drive,100,60606,Chicago,
street read as: South WACKER Drive in Chicago
5 addresses

2. Export every address in a postcode to a CSV:

terminalCLI
$ gridpin export usa.bin --postcode 60606 -o loop.csv
320 addresses
note: 3451201 points sampled from address ranges were left out: they are not addresses
terminalCLI
$ wc -l loop.csv
     323 loop.csv

3. Cut a file of one town and geocode on it:

terminalCLI
$ gridpin slice usa.bin --city Evanston --out evanston.bin 2>&1 | tail -1
19366 houses -> evanston.bin
terminalCLI
$ gridpin query evanston.bin "1603 Orrington Ave, Evanston, IL 60201" -k 1
{"lat":42.047146,"lon":-87.6808965,"precision":"house","score":7.268779,"confidence":0.95,"street":"ORRINGTON Avenue","housenumber":"1603","commune":"Evanston","postcode":"60201","flags":["street_exact","commune_exact","house_rep","pc_exact"],"weak":false,"match_level":"PointAddress","match_status":"M"}

What you get

list and export write the point, street, number, postcode and town, after two comment lines with the licence and attribution; --format gives JSONL, GeoJSON or GPX. slice writes a country file of the area that answers like the whole one, smaller and faster to load.

Why it works

The houses are stored street by street in the file, so a street, a postcode, a box, a circle or a polygon is read straight from it. Points placed between Census address ranges are not addresses, so export leaves them out and says how many.

Limits

  • Only what the file holds: the same coverage limits as for geocoding (where GridPin works).
  • --limit stops list after that many addresses, in the order of the file, not at random; for a random draw use gridpin sample.
  • A sliced file answers only inside its area: an address outside it gets no answer.

All its keys: list, export, slice. The functions: the sheet as a table, a smaller sheet.

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