[SOLVED] Is region no longer needed for Distance Matrix calls using Python library?

Is region no longer needed for Distance Matrix calls using Python library?

Previously I used the code below to call the distance matrix api using they python package googlemaps. The call worked last year 2021 but this year (2022) I get an error message to say

distance_matrix() got an unexpected keyword argument 'region'

If I take out the parameter the function completes but I am concerned that calculations could be less accurate without the region parameter. The https://googlemaps.github.io/google-maps-services-python/docs/index.html still includes the region parameter.

I'm running googlemaps package 2.5.1 on anaconda

Distance_Demo=gDistance.distance_matrix(origins =DemoOrigin,
                                        destinations=DemoDestination,
                                        mode='driving',
                                        units='metric',
                                        region="ie",
                                       departure_time=TimeAsInt,
                                       traffic_model='pessimistic')

Anyone any ideas what could be the issue?

Solution

This parameter doesn't exist until googlemaps 3.0, so you may want to update to newer version to use it.

Here is the commit that adds region parameter for your reference.