How to programmatically list available Google BigQuery locations? - google-bigquery

Question

How to programmatically list available Google BigQuery locations? I need a result similar to what is in the table of this page: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/locations.

Answer 1

As #shollyman has mentioned
The BigQuery API does not expose the equivalent of a list locations call at this time.
So, you should consider filing a feature request on the issue tracker.
Meantime, I wanted to add Option 3 to those two already proposed by #Tamir
This is a little naïve option with its pros and cons, but depends on your specific use case can be useful and easy adapted to your application
Step 1 - load page (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/locations) html
Step 2 - parse and extract needed info
Obviously, this is super simple to implement in any client of your choice
As I am huge BigQuery fan - I went through "prove of concept" using BigQuery Tool - Magnus
I've created workflow with just two Tasks:
API Task - to load page's HTML into variable var_payload
and
BigQuery Task - to parse and extract wanted info out of html
The "whole" workflow is as simple as it looks in below screenshot
The query I used in BigQuery Task is
CREATE TEMP FUNCTION decode(x STRING) RETURNS STRING
LANGUAGE js AS """
return he.decode(x);
"""
OPTIONS (library="gs://my_bucket/he.js");
WITH t AS (
SELECT html,
REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(
REGEXP_REPLACE(html,
r'\n|<strong>|</strong>|<code>|</code>', ''),
r'<table>(.*?)</table>'
)[OFFSET(0)] x
FROM (SELECT'''<var_payload>''' AS html)
)
SELECT pos,
line[SAFE_OFFSET(0)] Area,
line[SAFE_OFFSET(1)] Region_Name,
decode(line[SAFE_OFFSET(2)]) Region_Description
FROM (
SELECT
pos, REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(line, '<td>(.*?)</td>') line
FROM t,
UNNEST(REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(x, r'<tr>(.*?)</tr>')) line
WITH OFFSET pos
WHERE pos > 0
)
As you can see, i used he library. From its README:
he (for “HTML entities”) is a robust HTML entity encoder/decoder written in JavaScript. It supports all standardized named character references as per HTML, handles ambiguous ampersands and other edge cases just like a browser would ...
After workflow is executed and those two steps are done - result is in project.dataset.location_extraction and we can query this table to make sure we've got what is expected
Note: obviously parsing and extracting needed locations info is quite simplified and surely can be improved to be more flexible in terms of changing source page layout

Answer 2

Unfortunately, There is no API which provides BigQuery supported location list.
I see two options which might be good for you:
Option 1
You can manually manage a list and expose this list to your client via an API or any other means your application support (You will need to follow BigQuery product updates to follow on updates on this list)
Option 2
If your use case is to provide a list of the location you are using to store your own data you can call dataset.list to get a list of location and display/use it in your app
{
"kind": "bigquery#dataset",
"id": "id1",
"datasetReference": {
"datasetId": "datasetId",
"projectId": "projectId"
},
"location": "US"
}