Get latitude & longitude from particular address

Developers often needs to get the latitude and longitude of a particular place. This function takes an address as a parameter, and will return an array of data containing both latitude and longitude. I have used Google Maps API.

Code:

<?php

function getLatLong($address){
 if (!is_string($address))die("All Addresses must be passed as a string");
 $_url = sprintf('http://maps.google.com/maps?output=js&q=%s',rawurlencode($address));
 $_result = false;
 if($_result = file_get_contents($_url)) {
  if(strpos($_result,'errortips') > 1 || strpos($_result,'Did you mean:') !== false) return false;
  preg_match('!center:\s*{lat:\s*(-?\d+\.\d+),lng:\s*(-?\d+\.\d+)}!U', $_result, $_match);
  $_coords['lat'] = $_match[1];
  $_coords['long'] = $_match[2];
 }
 return $_coords;
}

//Using process
$location = getLatLong('Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Dhaka Division');
echo 'Latitude: '.$location['lat'].'<br />';
echo 'Longitude: '.$location['long'];

?>

Get latitude & longitude from particular address

Monday, April 22, 2013