Google Geocoding API with PHP

If you want to know where a particular address is by latitude and longitude, but only have the normal address details like street, city, zip, country, etc. then the Google Geocoding API should be able to help. By passing it an address string it will try to work out (just like Google Maps) whereabouts the address is, and return you a JSON or XML response with what it managed to figure out.

Below is a basic PHP example using cURL (based on an example from Stack Overflow by Jack W)

<pre>
<?php

function lookup($string){

   $string = str_replace (" ", "+", urlencode($string));
   $details_url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=".$string."&sensor=false";

   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $details_url);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
   $response = json_decode(curl_exec($ch), true);

   // If Status Code is ZERO_RESULTS, OVER_QUERY_LIMIT, REQUEST_DENIED or INVALID_REQUEST
   if ($response['status'] != 'OK') {
   	return null;
   }

   print_r($response);
   $geometry = $response['results'][0]['geometry'];

	$longitude = $geometry['location']['lat'];
	$latitude = $geometry['location']['lng'];

	$array = array(
		'latitude' => $geometry['location']['lng'],
		'longitude' => $geometry['location']['lat'],
		'location_type' => $geometry['location_type'],
	);

	return $array;

}

$city = 'San Francisco, USA';

$array = lookup($city);
print_r($array);

?>
</pre>