Question

I’ve been all over the internet trying to find out how to get the city and country from CLGeocoder. I can get the longitude and latitude easily but I need the city and country information, and I keep running into deprecated methods and such, any ideas? It basically needs to get the location, then have an NSString for the country, and an NSString for the city, so I can use them to look up more info or put them on labels, etc.

Answer 1

You need to revise your terminology a bit – CLGeocoder (and most geocoders) won’t give you a ‘city’ per-se – it uses terms such as ‘Administrative Area’, ‘Subadministrative Area’, etc. The CLGeocoder object will return an array of CLPlacemark objects which you can then query for the information you need. You init a CLGeocoder and call the reverseGeocodeLocation function with a location and a completion block. Here’s an example:

    if (osVersion() >= 5.0){

    CLGeocoder *reverseGeocoder = [[CLGeocoder alloc] init];

    [reverseGeocoder reverseGeocodeLocation:self.currentLocation completionHandler:^(NSArray *placemarks, NSError *error)
     {
         DDLogVerbose(@"reverseGeocodeLocation:completionHandler: Completion Handler called!");
         if (error){
             DDLogError(@"Geocode failed with error: %@", error);
             return;
         }

         DDLogVerbose(@"Received placemarks: %@", placemarks);


         CLPlacemark *myPlacemark = [placemarks objectAtIndex:0];
         NSString *countryCode = myPlacemark.ISOcountryCode;
         NSString *countryName = myPlacemark.country;
         DDLogVerbose(@"My country code: %@ and countryName: %@", countryCode, countryName);

     }];
    }

Now note that the CLPlacemark doesn’t have a ‘city’ property. The full list of properties can be found here: CLPlacemark Class Reference