This repo is a demo of how to use geographic coordinates to show localised country and city names for those coordinates in iOS using Swift.

This demo is a simple Swift iOS app showing a localised list of cities in a table view produced by a list of coordinates of those cities. Table view items have format City Name, Country Name in a language currently set in iOS device's Settings App.

Firstly, we create CLLocation objects by providing latitude and longitude for a city. Secondly, we create a CLGeocoder object and use it's reverseGeocodeLocation to get an array of CLPlacemark objects. Placemark objects include information such as the country, state, city, and street address associated with the specified coordinate. It can also include points of interest and geographically related data.

We use locality property of CLPlacemark to get localised city name, and country property of CLPlacemark to get localised country name.

Please note, that you need to add CoreLocation framework to your project before using CLGeocoder, CLLocation and CLPlacemark.

Let's use Stockholm as an example.

With English language set on device it will be shown as Stockholm, Sweden.
With Russian language set on device it will be shown as Стокгольм, Швеция.
With Swedish language set on device it will be shown as Stockholm, Sverige.

Go to Settings app -> General -> Language & Region -> iPhone Language. City and country names in the demo app will be displayed in the languaged selected there. Unless you are running the app in the simulator.

In Simulator both city and country name would be displayed not in the selected in Settings app language, but in language on the country, specified by the coordinates. For example, Copenhagen will be always shown as København in spite of the English language selected because it is the Danish name of Copenhagen.

It seems like CLGeocoder's reverseGeocodeLocation does not always work properly with city names for some languages. In this demo you are highly likely to see København instead of Копенгаген using Russian language selected on your device. Similarly Helsinki is displayed as Helsinki instead of Helsingfors with Swedish language selected. The reason of this behaviour is unknown for me.

Country names produced in this way, however, seem to be always localised correctly.