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I'm trying to use the Socrata SODA API on a NYC gov database by searching for specific street addresses. The URL would look as follows:

http://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/eabe-havv.json?house_street=PARK+PLACE

However, although I know that PARK PLACE exists in multiple entries in the database, there are no results that appear, and it seems that this is due to a large amount of whitespace following each value:

{
"date_entered": "05/26/1989",
"status": "CLOSED",
"special_district": "   ",
"inspection_date": "09/23/2014",
"unit": "MAN.",
"house_number": "75          ",
"dobrundate": "2014-09-24T00:00:00",
"complaint_category": "05",
"complaint_number": "1002073",
"disposition_code": "L2",
"bin": "1061700",
"house_street": "PARK PLACE               ",
"community_board": "109",
"disposition_date": "09/23/2014"
}

Any tips on how I can access both the house_street value and house_number value through a SoQl query appended to the API url? Thanks!

romeboards
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  • The issue appears to be the whitespace at the end of the value for both these columns that you're interested in. Even encoding the spaces doesnt seem to work – Mark Silverberg Nov 17 '14 at 19:42

2 Answers2

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As we talked about on IRC, I've reached out to our account management team about getting this dataset cleaned up. If you're having issues, others are likely having them as well.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention. @Skram's suggestions are good in the meantime.

chrismetcalf
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0

Due to the aforementioned (see comment) issue and fact that the SODA API does not currently support TRIM or LIKE functions, I think you'll need to use the SoQL full text search as follows:

http://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/eabe-havv.json?$q=PARK+PLACE

Documentation at http://dev.socrata.com/docs/queries.html

Mark Silverberg
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  • yeah, seemed like the only option. I wanted to avoid it, however, because I wasn't sure where the text might appear in a different field and cause inconsistencies. – romeboards Nov 17 '14 at 23:13