v.in.geonames(1grass)

💖 v.in.geonames 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the manual page for v.in.geonames — the little icon that slurps up geonames.org country files and drops them into a vector points map 🗺️✨

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✨ NAME ✨

v.in.geonames — imports geonames.org country files into a vector points map 🫶

🏷️ KEYWORDS 🏷️

vector, import, gazetteer

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

v.in.geonames
v.in.geonames --help
v.in.geonames input=name output=name  [--overwrite]  [--help]
[--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🎀 Flags 🎀

• --overwrite — let your output files just bulldoze whatever was already sitting there, no cap
• --help — prints the usage summary, aka the cheat sheet
• --verbose — verbose module output, she's chatty
• --quiet — quiet module output, she's giving nothing
• --ui — force-launches the GUI dialog, for when you want the clicky experience

🦋 Parameters 🦋

• input=name [required] — name of your uncompressed geonames file (it needs the .txt extension, don't forget)
• output=name [required] — name for the output vector map

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So v.in.geonames imports Geonames.org country files (that's Gazetteer data, iykyk) straight into a GRASS vector points map. The country files live on the GeoNames Data Dump Server and you can just go download them. ⚠️ Only original files can be processed, so unzip that compressed file first, bestie, the module will not do it for you. These Geonames files are encoded in UTF-8, and that UTF-8 stays intact in your GRASS database. Periodt.

✨ NOTES ✨

v.in.geonames is not out here doing everything alone — it calls v.in.ascii to actually import the data into GRASS. Teamwork 💖

The current DB connection is what gets used to write the database table (peep db.connect). And here's the tea: if you're importing into a DBF database, the original column names that are longer than 10 characters get shortened to 10 characters, because DBF has column name restrictions and she refuses to bend. If that's a problem for you, consider picking a different database driver with db.connect (eg. the SQLite driver 👑).

The main geoname table has these fields, and honestly, the lineup:

• geonameid — integer id of record in geonames database
• name — name of geographical point (utf8) varchar(200)
• asciiname — name of geographical point in plain ascii characters, varchar(200)
• alternatenames — alternatenames, comma separated varchar(4000)
• latitude — latitude in decimal degrees (wgs84)
• longitude — longitude in decimal degrees (wgs84)
• feature class — see https://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html, char(1)
• feature code — see https://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html, varchar(10)
• country code — ISO-3166 2-letter country code, 2 characters
• cc2 — alternate country codes, comma separated, ISO-3166 2-letter country code, 60 characters
• admin1 code — fipscode (subject to change to iso code), isocode for the us and ch, see file admin1Codes.txt for display names of this code; varchar(20)
• admin2 code — code for the second administrative division, a county in the US, see file admin2Codes.txt; varchar(80)
• admin3 code — code for third level administrative division, varchar(20)
• admin4 code — code for fourth level administrative division, varchar(20)
• population — integer
• elevation — in meters, integer
• gtopo30 — average elevation of 30'x30' (ca 900mx900m) area in meters, integer
• timezone — the timezone id (see file https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/timeZones.txt)
• modification date — date of last modification in yyyy-MM-dd format

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🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

Download and import geonames for Czech Republic. Czech it out 🇨🇿 (sorry, had to):

wget https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/CZ.zip
unzip CZ.zip
v.in.geonames input=CZ.txt output=geonames_cz

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📚 REFERENCES 📚

• GeoNames Web site
• GeoNames Data Dump Server

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

db.connect, v.in.ascii, v.select

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

Markus Neteler

💾 SOURCE CODE 💾

Available at: v.in.geonames source code (history)

Latest change: Thursday May 22 03:42:15 2025 in commit: 370bcb0490b421ac90b2dbe5766af9512cb08f92

Main index | Vector index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

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and that's the whole page, bestie, you ate it 💅✨ we're running GRASS 8.5.0 up in here, and this was v.in.geonames(1grass) — © 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual. no cap, go import some gazetteer data 🦋💖