The goal of arcgeocoder is to provide a lightweight interface for geocoding addresses and reverse geocoding locations through the ArcGIS REST API geocoding service.
The full site with examples and vignettes is available at https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/.
arcgeocoder provides a lightweight interface for geocoding and reverse geocoding with the ArcGIS REST API service. It accesses the API without depending on additional HTTP packages such as curl. In some situations, curl may not be available or accessible, so arcgeocoder uses base functions to avoid this limitation.
The interface of arcgeocoder is designed to make the API features
easier to access. The API endpoints used by arcgeocoder are
findAddressCandidates and reverseGeocode, which can be accessed
without an API key.
Other packages are more mature and provide similar features:
- tidygeocoder (Cambon et al. 2021) provides an interface to ArcGIS, Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), Google, TomTom, Mapbox and other services for geocoding and reverse geocoding.
- nominatimlite (Hernangómez 2024) is similar to arcgeocoder but uses data from OpenStreetMap through the Nominatim API service.
Install arcgeocoder from CRAN with:
install.packages("arcgeocoder")Check the documentation for the development version in https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/dev/.
You can install the development version of arcgeocoder with:
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("dieghernan/arcgeocoder")Alternatively, you can install arcgeocoder using the r-universe:
# Install arcgeocoder in R:
install.packages(
"arcgeocoder",
repos = c(
"https://dieghernan.r-universe.dev",
"https://cloud.r-project.org"
)
)Note: examples adapted from the tidygeocoder package.
In this first example, we geocode a few addresses using the arc_geo()
function. Note that arcgeocoder works without additional setup, and
you do not need to provide an API key to start geocoding.
library(arcgeocoder)
library(dplyr)
# Create a data frame with addresses.
some_addresses <- tribble(
~name, ~addr,
"White House", "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC",
"Transamerica Pyramid", "600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA 94111",
"Willis Tower", "233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60606"
)
# Geocode the addresses.
lat_longs <- arc_geo(
some_addresses$addr,
lat = "latitude",
long = "longitude",
progressbar = FALSE
)Only a few fields are returned from the geocoding service in this
example, but full_results = TRUE can be used to return all data from
the service.
| query | latitude | longitude | address | score | x | y | xmin | ymin | xmax | ymax | wkid | latestWkid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC | 38.89768 | -77.03655 | 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20500 | 100 | -77.03655 | 38.89768 | -77.03755 | 38.89668 | -77.03555 | 38.89868 | 4326 | 4326 |
| 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA 94111 | 37.79516 | -122.40273 | 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, California, 94111 | 100 | -122.40273 | 37.79516 | -122.40373 | 37.79416 | -122.40173 | 37.79616 | 4326 | 4326 |
| 233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60606 | 41.87867 | -87.63587 | 233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, Illinois, 60606 | 100 | -87.63587 | 41.87867 | -87.63687 | 41.87767 | -87.63487 | 41.87967 | 4326 | 4326 |
Table 1: Example: geocoding addresses.
To perform reverse geocoding (obtaining addresses from geographic
coordinates), we can use the arc_reverse_geo() function. The arguments
are similar to those in arc_geo(), but now we specify the input data
columns with the x and y arguments. The data used here comes from
the geocoding query above. The single-line address is returned in the
column named by address.
reverse <- arc_reverse_geo(
x = lat_longs$longitude,
y = lat_longs$latitude,
address = "address_found",
progressbar = FALSE
)| x | y | address_found |
|---|---|---|
| -77.03655 | 38.89768 | White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, USA |
| -122.40273 | 37.79516 | Chess Ventures, 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA, 94111, USA |
| -87.63587 | 41.87867 | The Metropolitan, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL, 60606, USA |
Table 2: Example: reverse geocoding addresses.
It is also possible to search for specific locations within or near a
reference area or location using category
filtering.
See the documentation for the arc_categories data object for more
information.
In the following example, we look for food-related points of interest (POIs), such as restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries, near the Eiffel Tower in France.
library(ggplot2) # For plotting.
# Step 1: Locate the Eiffel Tower using a multi-field query.
eiffel_tower <- arc_geo_multi(
address = "Tour Eiffel",
city = "Paris",
countrycode = "FR",
langcode = "FR",
custom_query = list(outFields = "LongLabel")
)
# Display results.
eiffel_tower |>
select(lon, lat, LongLabel)
#> # A tibble: 1 × 3
#> lon lat LongLabel
#> <dbl> <dbl> <chr>
#> 1 2.29 48.9 Tour Eiffel, 3 Rue de l'Université, 75007, 7e Arrondissement, Par…
# Use `lon` and `lat` to boost the search with `category = "Food"`.
food_eiffel <- arc_geo_categories(
"Food",
x = eiffel_tower$lon,
y = eiffel_tower$lat,
limit = 50,
full_results = TRUE
)
# Plot by food type.
ggplot(eiffel_tower, aes(x, y)) +
geom_point(shape = 17, color = "red", size = 4) +
geom_point(data = food_eiffel, aes(x, y, color = Type)) +
labs(
title = "Food near the Eiffel Tower",
subtitle = "Using arcgeocoder",
color = "Type of place",
x = "",
y = "",
caption = "Data from the ArcGIS REST API service"
)It is straightforward to convert arcgeocoder results to an sf object:
library(sf)
food_eiffel_sf <- st_as_sf(
food_eiffel,
coords = c("lon", "lat"),
# Set the CRS of the resulting coordinates.
crs = eiffel_tower$wkid
)
food_eiffel_sf
#> Simple feature collection with 50 features and 85 fields
#> Geometry type: POINT
#> Dimension: XY
#> Bounding box: xmin: 2.2899 ymin: 48.8565 xmax: 2.299326 ymax: 48.86134
#> Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
#> # A tibble: 50 × 86
#> q_category q_x q_y q_bbox_xmin q_bbox_ymin q_bbox_xmax q_bbox_ymax
#> * <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <lgl> <lgl> <lgl> <lgl>
#> 1 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 2 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 3 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 4 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 5 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 6 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 7 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 8 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 9 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> 10 Food 2.29 48.9 NA NA NA NA
#> # ℹ 40 more rows
#> # ℹ 79 more variables: address <chr>, score <int>, x <dbl>, y <dbl>,
#> # Loc_name <chr>, Status <chr>, Score <int>, Match_addr <chr>,
#> # LongLabel <chr>, ShortLabel <chr>, Addr_type <chr>, Type <chr>,
#> # PlaceName <chr>, Place_addr <chr>, Phone <chr>, URL <chr>, Rank <int>,
#> # AddBldg <chr>, AddNum <chr>, AddNumFrom <chr>, AddNumTo <chr>,
#> # AddRange <chr>, Side <chr>, StPreDir <chr>, StPreType <chr>, …
ggplot(food_eiffel_sf) +
geom_sf(aes(color = Type)) +
coord_sf(crs = 3035)
Hernangómez D (2026). arcgeocoder: Geocode with the ArcGIS REST API Service. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.arcgeocoder. https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/.
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@Manual{R-arcgeocoder,
title = {{arcgeocoder}: Geocode with the {ArcGIS} {REST} {API} Service},
doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.arcgeocoder},
author = {Diego Hernangómez},
year = {2026},
version = {0.4.0},
url = {https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/},
abstract = {Lightweight interface for geocoding addresses and reverse geocoding locations around the world with the ArcGIS REST API service <https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geocode/api-reference/overview-world-geocoding-service.htm>. Address text can be converted to location candidates and coordinates can be converted into addresses. No API key is required.},
}
Cambon, Jesse, Diego Hernangómez, Christopher Belanger, and Daniel Possenriede. 2021. “tidygeocoder: An R Package for Geocoding.” Journal of Open Source Software 6 (65): 3544. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03544.
Hernangómez, Diego. 2024. nominatimlite: Interface with Nominatim API Service. Version 0.2.1. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5113195.