Ask HN: API to discover lat/long coordinates from a city name and country

2 points by rodrigoavie 11 years ago | 6 comments

Hi everyone, I have a list of city names say, all the cities in Germany, and I want to get lat/lng coordinates for each one of them.

Is there any API I can use to get this kind of data? Google and Foursquare did not seem to help with that

thanks for your time

UPDATE: you people are amazing, thanks for the responses!

conductor 11 years ago |

It's called geocoding. There are several free services who provide API. Here are two of them from the first page of my search results:

rodrigoavie 11 years ago | |

thank you so much!

taurenk 11 years ago |

Geonames.org has files containing zip code, city and, lat/lon: http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/

Hope this helps.

rodrigoavie 11 years ago | |

Sure it helps! Even if this database does not contain every city that I wanna check, it definitely helps.

thank you very much

runlevel1 11 years ago |

Google's Geocoding API does just that.

Example:

    https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Berlin&sensor=false

rodrigoavie 11 years ago | |

thanks! That is exactly what I was looking for!