Comments on: PHP Geocoding tutorial with the Google Maps API – Part One

By: Brad Wedell

Brad Wedell — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:46:22 +0000

Quick update, have spoken with Monte and have changed the URL for the Google Code repository: the new url is http://code.google.com/p/php-google-map-api – sorry for the confusion!

By: Brad Wedell

Brad Wedell — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:35:09 +0000

I just released an updated version of the PHPGoogleMapAPI (which I have coined PHPGoogleMapAPIv3). The original version from Monte Ohrt was pretty powerful, and I have gone ahead and updated it to use the new V3 of the Google Maps APIs. With this class, if you wanted to do a geocoding request, you would simply do:

$map_object = new GoogleMapAPI();
$geo_coords = $map_object->getGeocode($address);

if( $geo_coords != false ){
echo $geo_coords["lat"];
echo $geo_coords["lon"];
}

The code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/phpgooglemapapiv3/

By: Stu D'Alessandro

Stu D'Alessandro — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:24:52 +0000

Chicago, I believe you want to specify json as the output format, otherwise looks great.

$url = “http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=”.$address.”&output=json&key=”.$key;

Thanks Tim et al for a super helpful article!!

By: Chicago Web Developer

Chicago Web Developer — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:14:16 +0000

HERE IS UPDATED CODE SINCE THE API HAS CHANGED!

//Set up our variables
$longitude = "";
$latitude = "";
$precision = "";

//Three parts to the querystring: q is address, output is the format (
$key = "YOUR API KEY HERE";
$address = urlencode("columbia MO");
$url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=".$address."&output=csv&key=".$key;

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$geo_json = json_decode($data, true);

print_r($geo_json);

if ($geo_json['Status']['code'] == '200') {

$precision = $geo_json['Placemark'][0]['AddressDetails']['Accuracy'];
$latitude = $geo_json['Placemark'][0]['Point']['coordinates'][0];
$longitude = $geo_json['Placemark'][0]['Point']['coordinates'][1];

echo "Precision: $precision \n";
echo "Latutide: $latitude \n";
echo "Longitude: $longitude \n";

} else {
echo "Error in geocoding! Http error ".substr($data,0,3);
}

By: Ray

Ray — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:50:56 +0000

You beautiful little coder you, it still works, thanks so far. But where would I put the sleep(1); command? I do not really see any place to put it where it would cause any effect. As I imagine the 300 are accessing the site each second, thus making the whole process an instant kill victim by Google. I’d have to split up the requests among and route them to a couple of dozen physically different servers returning the geocoding results, to make the kill access menace go away theoretically.

By: GeoCoding in PHP | Things I Forgot

GeoCoding in PHP | Things I Forgot — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:05:07 +0000

[...] an excellent article by Tim Showers, here are my notes on [...]

By: Hung Nguyen

Hung Nguyen — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:03:34 +0000

This is what i’ve been looking for, you save my day

LEGEND!

By: Kurt Reinholtz

Kurt Reinholtz — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:38:51 +0000

Very nice, thank you. Elegant solution saved me a lot of time. Very much appreciated!

By: Kailash Dave

Kailash Dave — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:24:21 +0000

Many thanks Sir
It is realy very helpful for the developers to done with the integration part without waisting much to do so

Regards

By: Alan Jackson

Alan Jackson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:57:16 +0000

Tim,

Many thanks. I have tried many ways to do exactly this. My PHP is on an up an coming level so far. I got to the point in my head of what I needed to retrieve, the fact that I would need to explode it and got an URL working just didn’t know how to go about getting the information from Google.

With this code I feel I can finally get over that “hump”.

-Alan