title: Cardinal-direction latitude and longitude to decimal
body: <p>I'm attempt to extract latitudes and longitudes from <a href="http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/wxitsu.htm" rel="nofollow">some of NOAA's weather bulletins</a>. The issue is that the lat and longs use cardinal direction to indicate in which direction the lat or long offset is — not "pure" decimal, which indicates the direction of the offset by the number's sign (i.e. positive or negative).</p>
  
  <p>Retrieving the coordinates:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    &gt;&gt;&gt; import urllib2, re
      &gt;&gt;&gt; url = 'http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/we/weca43.pheb.tib.cax.txt'
      &gt;&gt;&gt; request = urllib2.urlopen(url)
      &gt;&gt;&gt; re.search('COORDINATES\s+-\s+(.*)', request.read()).groups()[0]
      '60.6 SOUTH   25.4 WEST'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can parse them, but as there are a number of ways to go about accomplishing that, I wanted to know what I should keep in mind while attempting a solution.</p>
  
  <p>Also, Google understands such coordinates, but there doesn't seem to an API to parse it.</p>