Geodog

Google unofficially provides geocoding web service

Kudos to Chauncey Thorn for this fun little hack to use Google for Geocoding that he posted on a FLOSS mailing list/ forum. Google would probably notice, mind, and shut down enterprise level use, but I imagine informal web services like this will put pricing pressure on geocoding vendors, while increasing number of apps that take advantage of geographic data.

@params string full address
@return assoc array
$location = array('lat' => $lat, 'lng' => $lng)

function map_geocoder($address)
{
$address = urlencode($address);
$response = drupal_http_request('http://maps.google.com/maps?q='.$address);

// let find the lat/lng in the $response->data
preg_match("//",
$response->data, $matches);

// cleaning up
$match = preg_split('/ /',$matches[0]);
$lat = str_replace('lat=','',$match[1]);
$lat = str_replace('"','',$lat);
$lng = str_replace('lng=','',$match[2]);
$lng = str_replace('/> $lng = str_replace('"','',$lng);

// finally ...
$location['lat'] = $lat;
$location['lng'] = $lng;

return $location;
}