Question

I am using the Bing Maps SOAP Service, GeocodeService in my web application, to reverse geocode a point on map (i.e. get country name from longitude and latitude). I need to get all the exact country names that the web service can return. I tried to get all the country names from here but for example ‘Macedonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of’ is returned of ‘FYRO Macedonia’ in the web service. Is there a way to get all exact country names possible that the web service can return since I need to store them in a database?

Answer 1

brute force? (you may miss vatican city, but I’d expect you’d get the others, it will also spend a lot of time trying to geocoding oceans)

        GeoServiceReference.GeocodeServiceClient client = new GeoServiceReference.GeocodeServiceClient();

        var countries = new List<string>();

        for (double lat = 0; lat < 360; lat+=0.1)
            for(double lon = 0; lon < 360; lon+=0.1)
        {
            var result = client.ReverseGeocode(new GeoServiceReference.ReverseGeocodeRequest
            {
                Location = new GeoServiceReference.Location
                {
                    Latitude = lat,
                    Longitude = lon
                }
            });

            if (!countries.Contains(result.Results.First().Address.CountryRegion))
            {
                Console.WriteLine(result.Results.First().Address.CountryRegion);
                countries.Add(result.Results.First().Address.CountryRegion);
            }
        }