Overpass output city name instead of coordinates?

Question

I did a query to look for certain things. However it only outputs the lat and long coordinates, there is no city data available. I'd like to have the city it belongs to / closest city though.

I know there are websites where I can convert a single coordinate to a city. But since my initial output consist of hundreds of elements, is there a way to alter the query to convert it to the closest city in the first place?

Answer 1

You can use the CSV output format specify the tags you want to retrieve in the output, for example:

[out:csv("ISO3166-1","name")];
 ...
out; 

Combine this with a radius search:

[out:csv("name")];
(
  node(around:100000.0,50.75,6.05)["place"="city"];
  node(around:100000.0,55.75,7.05)["place"="city"];
);
(._;>;);
out; 

The number 100000 here depicts the radius in meters around a coordinate, the output is this:

name
Köln
Esbjerg
Moers
Bonn
Maastricht
Eindhoven
Aachen
Krefeld
... and a few more ...

As far as I can tell there is no "nearest" operator in the Overpass API though, so this may not be exactly what you want.