A package for easily working with US and state metadata.

• all US states and territories
• postal abbreviations
• Associated Press style abbreviations
• FIPS codes
• capitals
• years of statehood
• time zones
• phonetic state name lookup
• is contiguous or continental
• URLs to shapefiles for state, census, congressional districts, counties, and census tracts

As per usual:

pip install us

or

uv install us

This project uses uv for development.

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run black --check us

Easy access to state information:

>>> import us
>>> us.states.MD
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.MD.fips
'24'
>>> us.states.MD.name
'Maryland'
>>> us.states.MD.is_contiguous
True

Includes territories too:

>>> us.states.VI.name
'Virgin Islands'
>>> us.states.VI.is_territory
True
>>> us.states.MD.is_territory
False

List of all (actual) states:

>>> us.states.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...
>>> us.states.TERRITORIES
[<State:American Samoa>, <State:Guam>, <State:Northern Mariana Islands>, ...

And the whole shebang, if you want it:

>>> us.states.STATES_AND_TERRITORIES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:American Samoa>, ...

For convenience, STATES, TERRITORIES, and STATES_AND_TERRITORIES can be accessed directly from the us module:

>>> us.states.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...
>>> us.STATES
[<State:Alabama>, <State:Alaska>, <State:Arizona>, <State:Arkansas>, ...

Some states like to be fancy and call themselves commonwealths:

>>> us.states.COMMONWEALTHS
[<State:Kentucky>, <State:Massachusetts>, <State:Pennsylvania>, <State:Virginia>]

There's also a list of obsolete territories:

>>> us.states.OBSOLETE
[<State:Dakota>, <State:Orleans>, <State:Philippine Islands>]

The state lookup method allows matching by FIPS code, abbreviation, and name:

>>> us.states.lookup('24')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('MD')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('md')
<State:Maryland>
>>> us.states.lookup('maryland')
<State:Maryland>

Get useful information:

>>> state = us.states.lookup('maryland')
>>> state.abbr
'MD'

And for those days that you just can't remember how to spell Mississippi, we've got phonetic name matching too:

>>> us.states.lookup('misisipi')
<State:Mississippi>

If your lookup values come from user input or other unpredictable sources, clean_name() can strip them down to something the lookup is more likely to match. It lowercases the input, removes punctuation, and drops the filler words the, commonwealth, state, and of:

>>> us.states.clean_name(' The state OF idaho ')
'idaho'
>>> us.states.clean_name('Commonwealth of Virginia')
'virginia'
>>> us.states.lookup(us.states.clean_name('The State of Maryland!'))
<State:Maryland>

clean_name is a standalone helper and lookup does not call it automatically. Apply it yourself when you want it.

lookup accepts an optional fallback_func that is called when none of the built-in matching strategies find a state. It receives the original lookup value and should return a State or None:

>>> def my_fallback(val):
...     return us.states.AK if val == 'the big one' else None
>>> us.states.lookup('the big one', fallback_func=my_fallback)
<State:Alaska>

For the common case of matching against the start of a state name, the included startswith_fallback helper does just that (case-insensitively):

>>> us.states.lookup('calif', fallback_func=us.states.startswith_fallback)
<State:California>

Fallback results are cached separately per fallback function, so a cached fallback match won't leak into lookups that pass a different fallback (or no fallback at all).

You want shapefiles too? As long as you want 2010 shapefiles, we've gotcha covered.

>>> urls = us.states.MD.shapefile_urls()
>>> sorted(urls.keys())
['block', 'blockgroup', 'cd', 'county', 'state', 'tract', 'zcta']
>>> urls['block']
'https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TABBLOCK/2010/tl_2010_24_tabblock10.zip'

The shapefile_urls() method on the State object generates shapefile URLs for the following regions:

• block
• blockgroup
• census tract (tract)
• congressional district (cd)
• county
• state
• zcta

Mappings between various state attributes are a common need. The mapping() method will generate a lookup between two specified fields.

>>> us.states.mapping('fips', 'abbr')
{'01': 'AL', '02': 'AK', '04': 'AZ', '05': 'AR', '06': 'CA', ...
>>> us.states.mapping('abbr', 'name')
{'AL': 'Alabama', 'AK': 'Alaska', 'AZ': 'Arizona', 'AR': 'Arkansas', ...

This method uses us.STATES_AND_TERRITORIES as the default list of states it will create a mapping for, but this can be overridden by passing an additional states argument:

>>> us.states.mapping('fips', 'abbr', states=[us.states.DC])
{'11': 'DC'}

Washington, DC does not appear in us.STATES or any of the related state lists, but is often treated as a state in practice and should be granted statehood anyway. DC can be automatically included in these lists by setting a DC_STATEHOOD environment variable to any truthy value before importing this package.

DC_STATEHOOD=1

When you need to know state information RIGHT AWAY, there's the states script.

$ states md

*** The great state of Maryland (MD) ***

    FIPS code: 24

    other attributes:
      ap_abbr: Md.
      capital: Annapolis
      capital_tz: America/New_York
      is_contiguous: True
      is_continental: True
      is_obsolete: False
      name_metaphone: MRLNT
      statehood_year: 1788
      time_zones: America/New_York

    shapefiles:
      tract: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TRACT/2010/tl_2010_24_tract10.zip
      cd: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/CD/111/tl_2010_24_cd111.zip
      county: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/COUNTY/2010/tl_2010_24_county10.zip
      state: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/STATE/2010/tl_2010_24_state10.zip
      zcta: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/ZCTA5/2010/tl_2010_24_zcta510.zip
      block: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/TABBLOCK/2010/tl_2010_24_tabblock10.zip
      blockgroup: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/BG/2010/tl_2010_24_bg10.zip

GitHub Actions are set up to automatically run unit tests against any new commits to the repo. To run these tests yourself:

uv sync
uv run pytest

See CHANGELOG.md for a history of changes.