Scraping Open Street Map for UK street names

We reserve the word "scraping" for people who, to our dismay, write clumsy scripts that make tons of individual requests against our API or web site. Don't do that - we're an open data project and we make our data available for download!

Grab a data extract for the UK e.g. from the Geofabrik download server, then use a program like Osmosis to filter out only highways:

osmosis --read-pbf file.osm.pbf --tf accept-ways highway=\* --write-xml myfile.osm

From the resulting XML file, extract all names - easiest on Linux with something like

grep 'k="name"' myfile.osm | cut -d\" -f4

and you have your list. (If you prefer DBF files to XML, you could probably download the shp.zip file from the download server and simply open the roads.dbf file.)

Caveats:

1. This procedure will yield names for everything tagged "highway", including cycleways, footways, steps, roundabouts.

2. This procedure does not allow you to count how often each name occurs in reality, because a road may consist of several parts in OSM, so the same road might feature multiple times in your file. Should you want to eliminate such double mentions, some programming or GIS magic will be required.

It might be better to start with something like OS OpenData, particularly the Locator dataset I think.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-locator/index.html

As yet, OpenStreetMap does not have as comprehensive a coverage as the OS data.

OpenStreetMap is arguably not the best data source for your application. You would be better served by using OS Locator, from the Ordnance Survey OpenData release, which has a better licence, a simpler file format, more consistent data, and is more complete.