arcgeocoder provides a lightweight interface to the ArcGIS REST API. It converts addresses into geographic coordinates, converts coordinates into addresses and finds places by category.
The full site with examples and vignettes is available at https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/.
arcgeocoder accesses the ArcGIS REST API without requiring an API key or an additional HTTP package such as curl. It uses base R download functions, which keeps its dependency footprint small.
The package provides focused interfaces to the findAddressCandidates
and reverseGeocode endpoints. These interfaces support single-line
addresses, structured address components, category filters and reverse
geocoding.
The following packages provide related geocoding features:
- tidygeocoder (Cambon et al. 2021) provides an interface to ArcGIS, Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), Google, TomTom, Mapbox and other geocoding services.
- nominatimlite (Hernangómez 2024) is similar to arcgeocoder but uses data from OpenStreetMap through the Nominatim API.
Install arcgeocoder from CRAN with:
install.packages("arcgeocoder")Read the documentation for the development version at 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"
)
)The examples in this section are adapted from the tidygeocoder package.
The arc_geo() function converts single-line addresses into geographic
coordinates. It requires no API key or additional setup.
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$addr,
lat = "latitude",
long = "longitude",
progressbar = FALSE
)By default, arc_geo() returns a small set of fields. Set
full_results = TRUE to return all available API fields.
| query | latitude | longitude | address | score | x | y | xmin | ymin | xmax | ymax | wkid | latestWkid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC | 38.89768 | -77.03655 | 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20500 | 100 | -77.03655 | 38.89768 | -77.03755 | 38.89668 | -77.03555 | 38.89868 | 4326 | 4326 |
| 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA 94111 | 37.79516 | -122.40273 | 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, California, 94111 | 100 | -122.40273 | 37.79516 | -122.40373 | 37.79416 | -122.40173 | 37.79616 | 4326 | 4326 |
| 233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60606 | 41.87867 | -87.63587 | 233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, Illinois, 60606 | 100 | -87.63587 | 41.87867 | -87.63687 | 41.87767 | -87.63487 | 41.87967 | 4326 | 4326 |
Table 1: Example: geocoding addresses.
The arc_reverse_geo() function converts longitude and latitude values
into addresses. Supply longitude values to x and latitude values to
y. The following example uses the coordinates returned by the previous
query. The address argument sets the name of the address column in the
output.
reverse <- arc_reverse_geo(
x = lat_longs$longitude,
y = lat_longs$latitude,
address = "address_found",
progressbar = FALSE
)| x | y | address_found |
|---|---|---|
| -77.03655 | 38.89768 | White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, USA |
| -122.40273 | 37.79516 | Chess Ventures, 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA, 94111, USA |
| -87.63587 | 41.87867 | The Metropolitan, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL, 60606, USA |
Table 2: Example: reverse geocoding addresses.
The arc_geo_categories() function finds places by category near a
location or within a bounding box. Available categories are documented
in arc_categories and in the ArcGIS category filtering
documentation.
The following example finds food-related places, such as restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries, near the Eiffel Tower in France.
library(ggplot2) # For plotting.
# Step 1: Locate the Eiffel Tower using a multi-field query.
eiffel_tower <- arc_geo_multi(
address = "Tour Eiffel",
city = "Paris",
countrycode = "FR",
langcode = "FR",
custom_query = list(outFields = "LongLabel")
)
# Display results.
eiffel_tower |>
select(lon, lat, LongLabel)
#> # A tibble: 1 × 3
#> lon lat LongLabel
#> <dbl> <dbl> <chr>
#> 1 2.29 48.9 Tour Eiffel, 3 Rue de l'Université, 75007, 7e Arrondissement, Par…
# Use `lon` and `lat` as a reference location for `category = "Food"`.
food_eiffel <- arc_geo_categories(
"Food",
x = eiffel_tower$lon,
y = eiffel_tower$lat,
limit = 50,
full_results = TRUE
)
# Plot by food type.
ggplot(eiffel_tower, aes(x, y)) +
geom_point(shape = 15, color = "blue", size = 4) +
geom_point(data = food_eiffel, aes(x, y, color = Type)) +
labs(
title = "Food near the Eiffel Tower",
subtitle = "Using arcgeocoder",
color = "Type of place",
x = "",
y = "",
caption = "Data from the ArcGIS REST API"
)
Use the longitude and latitude columns returned by arcgeocoder to create an sf object:
library(sf)
eiffel_tower_sf <- eiffel_tower |>
select(lon, lat, LongLabel) |>
st_as_sf(
coords = c("lon", "lat"),
# Set the CRS of the resulting coordinates.
crs = eiffel_tower$wkid
)
food_eiffel_sf <- st_as_sf(food_eiffel,
coords = c("lon", "lat"),
crs = eiffel_tower$wkid
)
ggplot(eiffel_tower_sf) +
geom_sf(shape = 15, color = "blue", size = 4) +
geom_sf(data = food_eiffel_sf, aes(color = Type)) +
coord_sf(crs = 3035)
Hernangómez D (2026). arcgeocoder: Address and Coordinate Search with the ArcGIS REST API. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.arcgeocoder. https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/.
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is shown below.
@Manual{R-arcgeocoder,
title = {{arcgeocoder}: Address and Coordinate Search with the {ArcGIS} {REST} {API}},
doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.arcgeocoder},
author = {Diego Hernangómez},
year = {2026},
version = {0.4.1},
url = {https://dieghernan.github.io/arcgeocoder/},
abstract = {Provides a lightweight interface to the ArcGIS REST API for converting addresses and structured address components into geographic coordinates, finding places by category and converting coordinates into addresses. It uses the ArcGIS service documented at <https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geocode/api-reference/overview-world-geocoding-service.htm>. 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.