Hi,
I'm building an application where users provide the addresses for their listings. It's certainly not practical to ask a simple user to provide the latitude and longitude for each address he provides!
Can I provide addresses to Google Maps API instead? If so, how?
Thanks.
Yes of course. That can be done very easily, using the Geocoding Services provided by the Google Maps JavaScript API. Consider the following example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<title>Google Maps Geocoding Demo 1</title>
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"
type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="map" style="width: 400px; height: 300px;"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var address = 'London, UK';
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map'), {
mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.TERRAIN,
zoom: 6
});
var geocoder = new google.maps.Geocoder();
geocoder.geocode({
'address': address
},
function(results, status) {
if(status == google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) {
new google.maps.Marker({
position: results[0].geometry.location,
map: map
});
map.setCenter(results[0].geometry.location);
}
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Screenshot:
You can simply substitute 'London, UK' from the address variable to any location that supports geocoding in Google Maps.