Getting random coordinates based on country

It is not a web-service or an API, however, it can be used to solve the issue.

For solving this task, shapefiles were downloaded from EfrainMaps. (It can be any other website that includes shapefiles covering the whole world, e.g. Thematic Mapping API or Natural Earth | Admin 0 – Countries).

Using the following Python code it is possible to take a country name and return a random point with its coordinates (not including the sea/ocean sections) inside that country.

Before running the code keep in mind the attributes of that particular shapefile, thus the country name that you put into the function should match its corresponding feature's attribute in the shapefile.

"""
Getting a random point inside a country based on its name.
In this solution, the shapefile with countries was used.
"""

# imports
import re
import random
import shapefile
from shapely.geometry import shape, Point

# function that takes a shapefile location and a country name as inputs
def random_point_in_country(shp_location, country_name):
    shapes = shapefile.Reader(shp_location) # reading shapefile with pyshp library
    country = [s for s in shapes.records() if country_name in s][0] # getting feature(s) that match the country name 
    country_id = int(re.findall(r'd+', str(country))[0]) # getting feature(s)'s id of that match

    shapeRecs = shapes.shapeRecords()
    feature = shapeRecs[country_id].shape.__geo_interface__

    shp_geom = shape(feature)

    minx, miny, maxx, maxy = shp_geom.bounds
    while True:
        p = Point(random.uniform(minx, maxx), random.uniform(miny, maxy))
        if shp_geom.contains(p):
            return p.x, p.y

random_point_in_country("D:/World_Countries/World_Countries.shp", "Ukraine")

The output will look like

(47.545113016917696, 33.4408633374681)

and the tuple is indeed located in Ukraine.

p.s. by the way it works also offline

---

References:

• How to read a shapefile in Python?
• Generate points that lie inside polygon
• GeospatialPython | pyshp