how to convert from longitude and latitude to country or city?

Question

I need to convert longitude and latitude coordinates to either country or city, is there an example of this in python?

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In general the Google API is the best approach. It was not suitable for my case as I had to process a lot of entries and the api is slow.

I coded a small version that does the same but downloads a huge geometry first and computes the countries on the machine.

import requests

from shapely.geometry import mapping, shape
from shapely.prepared import prep
from shapely.geometry import Point


data = requests.get("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datasets/geo-countries/master/data/countries.geojson").json()

countries = {}
for feature in data["features"]:
    geom = feature["geometry"]
    country = feature["properties"]["ADMIN"]
    countries[country] = prep(shape(geom))

print(len(countries))

def get_country(lon, lat):
    point = Point(lon, lat)
    for country, geom in countries.iteritems():
        if geom.contains(point):
            return country

    return "unknown"

print(get_country(10.0, 47.0))
# Austria