Get country name from latitude and longitude

Question

I have a latitude and a longitude, and I need to fetch country.

I am using this:

$geocode_stats = file_get_contents("http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=".$deal_lat.",".$deal_long . "&sensor=false");
$output_deals = json_decode($geocode_stats);
$country = $output_deals->results[2]->address_components[4]->long_name;

Sometimes it gives a correct country name, but sometimes it gives blank values, and sometimes it returns a city name.

Can anybody help?

Answer 1

I wrote a function to make it easy. Simply pass in your geo-address which can be a full address, zip code, or in your case latitude and longitude. It will then search through the address component array for the country. In the case that it is unable to find the county it will simply return null, you can change that to an empty string ("") if you need to.

function getGeoCounty($geoAddress) {
    $url = 'http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=' . $geoAddress .'&sensor=false'; 
    $get     = file_get_contents($url);
    $geoData = json_decode($get);
    if (json_last_error() !== JSON_ERROR_NONE) {
        throw new \InvalidArgumentException('Invalid geocoding results');
    }

    if(isset($geoData->results[0])) {
        foreach($geoData->results[0]->address_components as $addressComponent) {
            if(in_array('administrative_area_level_2', $addressComponent->types)) {
                return $addressComponent->long_name; 
            }
        }
    }
    return null; 
}

Answer 2

Get complete Address from latitude and longitude.

$url = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng='.trim($lat).','.trim($lng).'&sensor=false';
$json = @file_get_contents($url);$data=json_decode($json);
echo $data->results[0]->formatted_address;