Question

OK, here’s what I want to implement and I need your ideas :

• Input a geo location by name/address/etc (e.g. London, Oxford Street 20)
• Get the point’s longitude/latitude

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My Questions :

• How would you go about that?
• Is using Google Maps API (that’s what I first thought of) my only solution?

It’d be better if the service used CAN be freely integrated in a commercial app – so any idea is welcome… 🙂

Answer 1

There is a built in API for that.
For iOS 5 and newer you can use CLGeocoder and for older version you will need to use some extern libraries.

Just call

- (void)geocodeAddressString:(NSString *)addressString completionHandler:(CLGeocodeCompletionHandler)completionHandler

where you want to get the location. It runs async and in the completionHandler you will get an array of all possible placemarks for your address where the first one is the most accurate. As apple says:

For most geocoding requests, this array should contain only one
entry. However, forward-geocoding requests may return multiple
placemark objects in situations where the specified address could not
be resolved to a single location.

Off topic:
Am I the only one whos first thoughts about Oxford was “What does he mean with this weird Hex value?”