Geographical coordinates to street names

Question

is any way (with a rest API will be awesome) to get the Street name corresponding to a Geographical coordinate? I think the name is geocoding, do google have this API? Im PHP developer.

Ex.

<?php 
cor="38.115583,13.37579";
echo(geoname(cor)); // this prints: Foro Umberto I - 90133 Palermo  
?>

So the output of the function is the street name, the postal code and the city. Thanks for any help and scripts examples!

Answer 1

Yes, just use the "Reverse Geocoding" function in the Google Maps API: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/#ReverseGeocoding

Here's some example code:

$lat="38.115583";
$long = "13.37579";

$url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=$lat,$long&sensor=false";

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "");
$curlData = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

$address = json_decode($curlData);
print_r($address);

Answer 2

Here's my PHP function I used for doing a Reverse Geocode lookup for a street address using the Google MAP API. Note, this example gets the output from Google in JSON, but I am doing a simple parse in PHP.

/*
 * Use Google Geocoding API to do a reverse address lookup from GPS coordinates
 */
function GetAddress( $lat, $lng )
{   
    // Construct the Google Geocode API call
    //
    $URL = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=${lat},${lng}&sensor=false";

    // Extract the location lat and lng values
    //
    $data = file( $URL );
    foreach ($data as $line_num => $line) 
    {
        if ( false != strstr( $line, "\"formatted_address\"" ) )
        {
            $addr = substr( trim( $line ), 22, -2 );
            break;
        }
    }

    return $addr;
}

Andrew Team at OpenGeoCode.Org

btw> Google does have restrictions on using their APIs for commercial purposes. Basically, you need to display the result on a google map.