Refactor Python script into an isolatable method

There are a couple of things you can do. You might want to break each step of the script into separate methods each with their own exception handling, and logging to indicate where the job has failed. Also, I have not mentioned the return parameter here. You can return a True/False to suggest whether the processing has passed/failed.

You can then import the process_file method in other places, and pass it the 2 files that it needs to process.

import json
import requests
from collections import defaultdict
from pprint import pprint

def hasNumbers(inputString):
    return any(char.isdigit() for char in inputString)

def handle_get(url, params)
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, params=urlencode(params))
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:  # This is the correct syntax
        print e
        # sys.exit(1)
        response = None

    return response

def process_file(data_file_path, output_file_path)
    # open up the output of 'data-processing.py'
    with open(data_file_path) as data_file:

        # print the output to a file
        with open(output_file_path, 'w') as output_file_:
            for line in data_file:
                identifier, name, coords, number_of_jobs = line.split("|")
                coords = coords[1:-1]
                lat, lng = coords.split(",")
                params = OrderedDict([('lat', lat), ('lng', lng), ('username', 's.matthew.english')])
                url = "http://api.geonames.org/countrySubdivisionJSON"
                response = handle_get(url, params)
                if response:
                    json_response = response.json()
                else:
                    print('Something bad happened')
                    sys.exit(1)


                codes = response.get('codes', [])
                for code in codes:
                    if code.get('type') == 'ISO3166-2':
                        country_code = '{}-{}'.format(response.get('countryCode', 'UNKNOWN'), code.get('code', 'UNKNOWN'))
                        if not hasNumbers( country_code ):
                            # print("code: " + country_code + ", jobs: " + number_of_jobs)
                            output_file_.write("code: " + country_code + ", jobs: " + number_of_jobs)