About

A simple NPM package to find the smallest number of US states in between any two US states. Only includes the lower 48, for now...

Usage

Install package with the following:

npm install between-two-states

Then use it in a project like this:

var betweenTwoStates = require("between-two-states")

var path = betweenTwoStates.getTwoStatePath('MO','UT')

Currently, the getTwoStatePath method is the only one, and it requires two US state postal abbreviations, as strings, for the arguments. The returned path object in the above case would be this:

Object {DISTANCE: 3, PATH: "MOKSCOUT", STATE_1: "Missouri", STATE_1_ABBR: "MO", STATE_2: "Utah", STATE_2_ABBR: "UT"}

That's it :)

Payload Explanation

Here's a brief explanation of the JSON object that is returned:

• DISTANCE: Number of states between the two, plus the destination state. Ex: Starting in Utah, you move
• PATH: All of the states in the path, including the starting and destination states, as postal abbreviations in a string.
• STATE_1: The starting state name.
• STATE_1_ABBR: The starting state postal abbreviation. This is the first argument in the method call.
• STATE_2: The destination state name.
• STATE_2_ABBR: The destination state postal abbreviation. This is the second argument in the method call.

More Info and To Do

To get this data, I mostly did the mapping of routes by hand, so there may be some innaccuracies. In addition, some states have multiple routes between each other. I simply chose one possible route between the two for these cases.

Surely there's some more programmatic way to go about this... Maybe I'll work more on that later.

To Do:

• Add methods to search by full state names
• Add methods to return all routes for a given state
• Check for errors in data
• Find a more programmatic solution