How to get the number of results in a Nominatim search at Open Street Map (OSM)

Question

Good morning,

we try to do a research if we can use OSM for specific types of POIs in an app or if we need to get those POIs from other sources. For this, we could use the tags or a Nominatim search. However, results are always at least a list of results, e.g. in XML. It would be quite time-consuming to parse the XML for several keywords/tags an then count the entries. I tried the Nominatim API documentation and did several web searches, but cannot get an method how to do a search or direct database query to just get the result count of a search, not the results itself.

Which API, method, tool would you use for that? I'm new in development with OSM, so thanks for any hint in the right direction.

regards, e.

Answer 1

It seems like Nominatim doesn't support this type of query. But you don't have to parse the whole XML/JSON file, just count the number of top level entries.

Also note that you are not allowed to do bulk queries according to the usage policy. If you have lots of requests better install your own Nominatim instance or use MapQuest's Nominatim instance which doesn't have these limitations.