I'm attempting to retrieve H3 index keys directly adjacent to my current location. I'm wondering if this can be done by mutating/calculating the coordinate directly or if I have to use the library bindings to do this?
Take this example:
./bin/geoToH3 --resolution 6 --latitude 43.6533055 --longitude -79.4018915
This would return the key 862b9bc77ffffff. I now want to retrieve all relevant 6 neighbors keys (the values of the kRing I believe is how to describe it?).
A tangent though equally curious question might render the above irrelevant: if I were attempting to query entries that have all 7 indexes is there a better way than using an OR statement seeking all 7 values out? Since the index is numeric I'm wondering if I could just check for a range within the numeric representation?
The short answer is that you need to use kRing (either through the bindings or the command-line tools) to get the neighbors. While there are some limited cases where you could get the neighbors through bit manipulation of the index, in many cases the numeric index of a neighbor might be distant. The basic rule is that while indexes that are numerically close are geographically close, the reverse is not necessarily true.
For the same reason, you generally can't use a range query to look for nearby hexagons. The general lookup pattern is to find the neighboring cells of interest in code, using kRing, then query for all of them in your database.