Determine if a string is a valid geographic location

Question

I've got a bunch of "locations" - some are accurate (gaborone, botswana), some are geocodes (40.75,-73.997) and some are completely useless (#siliconcape). I need to find a way to run through the list and determine the City and Country of each string and geocode, and return nulls for the invalid locations.

Is there some sort of library/service/api/method that can be used to determine whether or not a given string represents a valid geographical location? While accounting for typos, ordering errors, etc?

Answer 1

Probably the easiest method would be to use something like the Google Geocoding API. It'll take a string and attempt to parse it to a location. You can get output as XML, JSON, CSV.

Here's some example CSV output:

input : gaborone, botswana
output: 200,4,-24.6541100,25.9087390

input : #siliconcape
output: 602,0,0,0

input : 40.75,-73.997
output: 200,8,"324 W 30th St, New York, NY 10001, USA"

Answer 2

I think I've found a solution - just sharing it here in case anyone else needs it:

Use Google Maps API geocoding - feed it addresses and get co-ordinates back. Details for doing it via PHP: http://www.phpriot.com/articles/google-maps-geocoding/