Add a --first-feature option to the geocoder

[perrygeo]

Instead of getting a featurecollection with the first 5 results, many use cases at the command line will require selecting a single result, usually the first feature.

I've been using this pattern to get a GeoJSON Feature

mapbox geocoding "place" | jq -c .features[0]

Useful for geocoding multiple places and making a GeoJSON FeatureCollection

cat places.txt | parallel mapbox geocoding {} | jq -c .features[0] | fio collect

But jq isn't installed everywhere (it should be, it's awesome) and the arguments are not immediately clear.

Proposal

A --first-feature option to output the first, highest-ranked Feature (without line-breaks to facilitate streaming) rather than a FeatureCollection.

The parallel geocoding of multiple addresses becomes a little cleaner:

cat places.txt | parallel mapbox geocoding --first-feature {} | fio collect

The only reason I'd hesitate to implement this would be our design principles #10:

We'll rely on other programs like sed, awk, jq for finer parsing of responses from APIs at first, absorbing some of this when it makes sense.

So, does --first-feature make sense? Or do we just rely on jq?

[KaiBot3000]

I like this idea, and if it makes your life easier I think it's worth the added complexity 👍