[Talk-GB] Tagging a Driving Test Centre

[Mark Goodge]

On 23/01/2023 12:01, Dan Glover wrote:
> On 2023-01-23 11:13, Mark Goodge wrote:
> 
>> If anybody felt like making the effort (and I might even get round to
>> it myself if I find a few spare tuits), it would probably be
>> relatively simple to script a set of queries to generate the full
>> list. You wouldn't need a query for every postcode in the UK, you
>> could probably whittle it down to fewer than a hundred or so based on
>> urban centres.
> 
> Yes. There seem to be ten results for each query. The trick will be to 
> avoid overlaps without leaving holes.

If I was going to do it, I'd probably start by seeding the script with 
an outlying postcode (ie, top right of Scotland or bottom left of 
England), run a query for that, store the results, and then re-query for 
the postcode of every newly discovered test centre. That would, of 
course, result in a lot of overlaps, but I suspect we'd still be in the 
low thousands of queries rather than the 1.6 million you'd need to check 
every postcode.

Having checked, the system seems to simply return the nearest ten 
locations, rather than constraining it to a specific radius, and it does 
jump to islands (ie, it's using crow distance rather than driving 
distance). If you put in a John O'Groats postcode, for example, it will 
return results from Orkney and Aberdeen. So maybe the best place to 
start from would be Lerwick.

Mark