Specifiying benchmark and vintage when batch geocoding with geocoding.geo.census.gov

Question

I have looked at the REST API documentation (which only provides one example with a value of benchmark=9) and am not clear on how to make a batch request. In particular, the rest of the documentation does not mention a benchmark of "9," so I have no idea what this means. I have tried using the following benchmark and vintage from the documentation:

curl --form addressFile="//filepath/input.csv" --form benchmark=Public_AR_ACS2013 --form vintage=Current_ACS2013 http://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/locations/addressbatch --output geocoderresult.csv

My problem is that I am getting 400 response with a "malformed syntax" error. Can anyone with experience using this API point out what part of my syntax is incorrect?

Answer 1

I tried this syntax and it worked to get both location (lon/lat) and census geographies:

curl --form addressFile=@tiger_50addresses_to_geocode.csv --form benchmark=Public_AR_Census2010 --form vintage=Census2010_Census2010 http://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/geographies/addressbatch