Proposal: Use "Normalized" City Names when Calling FastAPI Routes

[danoand]

Making a change to this proposal that is consistent with how walkscore.com handles city names

BACKGROUND

• So far, all of the DS API routes take city name as a path parameter (e.g. GET /city_scr/<city>)
• Some city names include spaces and non-alpha characters (e.g. St. Louis, Fort Wayne)
• This may cause errors when invoking routes for those city variants

PROPOSAL

• Propose we use some sort normalized or adjusted city name in these instances
• Normalized city names would have these adjustments:
  • convert spaces (" ") to underscores ("_")
  • remove all other characters that are not alpha or underscores

Examples

• Chicago stays Chicago -> GET /city_scr/Chicago
• St. Louis becomes St_Louis -> GET /city_scr/St_Louis
• New York becomes New_York -> GET /city_scr/New_York

[schang1146]

I agree.

I like the system that you have set up for normalizing the city names.

Not sure what 3rd party APIs/DBs are doing for other special characters. I don't know if it'll be an issue for our case but cities can have other special characters. Not sure if we need to account for these.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_diacritics)

[danoand]

Good point regarding other special characters. We may not need that complexity for our particular use case but worth checking out.

Another option is to share a master list/mapping of cities in both the web and ds backends and have city names map to a code (e.g. St. Louis => 087) and pass the code when calling the route

[danoand]

Closed on normalizing city names. See the wiki for route documentation and examples: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/cityspire-d-ds/wiki/Sample-Routes

Closing this issue