MKMapView Placing a pin on a country using its name - iphone

Question

I have an array of country names and wish to place them on a MKMapView as Placemarks. So for example if France is in the countryName array I would like a pin placed on the center of France.
Is there a way of doing this without having the lat/long stored for each country?
I would like to make this work offline and only require the map in its most basic and fully zoomed out image of the world.
I believe MKMapView holds some basic geo information so is the above possible without the use of GLGeocoder and a internet connection?

Answer 1

try this function for get latitude and longitude for address:-(if you use only country name then we get center lat nag long for that country)
-(CLLocationCoordinate2D) getLocationFromAddressString:(NSString*) countryStr {
    NSString *urlAddressStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=%#&output=csv",
                           [countryStr stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
    NSString *locationStr = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:urlAddressStr]];
    NSArray *items = [locationStr componentsSeparatedByString:#","];
    double lat = 0.0;
    double long = 0.0;
    if([items count] >= 4 && [[items objectAtIndex:0] isEqualToString:#"200"])
{
        lat = [[items objectAtIndex:2] doubleValue];
        long = [[items objectAtIndex:3] doubleValue];
    }
    CLLocationCoordinate2D location;
    location.latitude = lat;
    location.longitude = long;
    return location;
}
after you get latitude and longitude
1)add use the mapKit Framework
3)set latitude and longitude on region
3) use this function
- (MKAnnotationView *)mapView:(MKMapView *)mV viewForAnnotation:(id )annotation

Answer 2

This method will not work unless you store the data file (sqlite) into the application and query the database as you place the pins into the map. But it will guarantee the map data availability in offline mode.
Basically you can make use of the shape file available
http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php
Import it as sqlite file using the .loadshp command described
http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-tutorial-2.3.1.html
Once you have imported the sqlite file, you can just query something like
select lon,lat from world_borders where name like 'Zambia';
where
lon = longitude,
lat = latitude,
world_borders = table name
and 'Zambia' = country name.