When I work on an app with location-based features, I often need the geo coordinates of a specific place for testing. Since it’s surprisingly difficult to view a location’s coordinates in Google Maps (let alone copy them in the correct format), I used to get them from a place’s page on Wikipedia, but it became a bit tedious over time.

Ruby Geocoder Gem

I started looking for a better way and found Alex Reisner’s fantastic Ruby Geocoder gem. It comes with a command line interface that works like this:

> [sudo] gem install geocoder
Fetching: geocoder-1.1.9.gem (100%)
Successfully installed geocoder-1.1.9
1 gem installed

> geocode "Alexanderplatz, Berlin"
Latitude:         52.521642
Longitude:        13.411007
Full address:     Berlin Alexanderplatz (S), 10178 Berlin, Germany
City:             Berlin
State/province:   Berlin
Postal code:      10178
Country:          Germany
Google map:       http://maps.google.com/maps?q=52.521642,13.411007

This is great, but copying and pasting the coordinates into code still requires multiple steps. So I wrote a little script that directly uses the geocoder’s Ruby API and prints the coordinates in the format I need to pass them to CLLocationCoordinate2DMake():

> ./geocode_coordinates.rb "Alexanderplatz, Berlin"
52.521642, 13.411007

The script takes its inputs either from the command line or from stdin. You can download it from GitHub.

An Automator Service for OS X

We can further improve the workflow by turning the script into a service for OS X that works on the currently selected text. We can do this with Automator. Download the workflow.¹

After you have installed the service, select one or multiple place names or addresses (one per line) in any app and choose [App Name] > Services > Geocode to replace the selection with the resulting coordinates. You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the service in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts.

Keep in mind that you still need to install the Ruby Geocoder gem before you can run the Automator workflow. If you use a Ruby version manager such as rbenv or RVM, make sure to install the gem under the system’s Ruby installation. For example in rbenv:

> rbenv global system
> sudo gem install geocoder