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I want to have certain code such that given the latitude and longitude as input, I want to get the continent which it belongs to? I know I can manually read the coordinates and then see that from the map. But is there an easier way to do it?

I don't need a visualization. I just need a kind of function that returns the name of the continent

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What are your tolerance limits? A quick and dirty solution could be to use the corners of a rectangle that encloses each continent and check to see if the coordinates are within the range of each corner but that solution will likely result in errors near borders. – Kevin Dec 16 '12 at 21:38
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What software are you using? – whuber♦ Dec 16 '12 at 21:57
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Possible duplicate of gis.stackexchange.com/questions/30254/… – BradHards Dec 17 '12 at 2:09
In addition to the sugegstion made by @Kevin, you also need to maintain the bounding box for each continent and compare the co-ordinate with all the bounding boxes to get the continent. Though, you need to consider the boundary conditions for an effective solution. – ujjwalesri Dec 17 '12 at 5:52

closed as not a real question by iant♦, whuber♦ Dec 18 '12 at 15:03

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