Earlier this week we added a new annotation to our results - if possible we now return the key flag for each location with the value being the emoji unicode representation of the flag for the country of the result.
Here’s an example of the JSON results for the query for “Vatican City”
One thing to note is that we default to showing the flag associated with the
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the region, which in some cases is different than
the flag of the country. A good example is Puerto Rico, which has ISO code
PR, while the code for the United States, of which Puerto Rico is a part
is US. So in this case we return the Puerto Rican flag emoji.
Emoji are a lot of fun, but also a quick way to express a concept quickly and
across cultures. A good example is on our demo page, where we now show the flag next to each result so you can more quickly visually process the results, especially when you search for a place with a common name. Here’s a search for Parisfor example.
As always, please refer to the API docs for a full list of all annotations. Also, if you don’t need them you can always turn annotations off by using the optional no_annotations parameter.
happy geocoding,