[geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 11:02:16AM -0600, Dave Kimmel wrote:
> So, does anyone know of anything that I can feed a city, province, and
> country to and get a lat/long pair back?

Won't work.  Consider that some countries are tall and thin (eg Italy),
others like Russia are short and fat, whilst others are square, like France.
Then consider that really small countries can border much larger countries,
such as Andorra bordering Spain and France.  A single co-ordinate pair
for each country will be silly, as something like a sixth of Spain is closer
to the centre of Andorra than to the centre of Spain, and that a circle
centred on Rome and big enough to cover all of Italy will also cover one
entire French department (Corsica), San Marino, Monaco, Vatican, possibly
Malta, and parts of Switzerland, Slovenia, Albania, Montenegro, etc.  And
a circle big enough to contain Russia will also cover - well, all of Asia.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   it's amazing that your parents can be so kind and
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