Using PHP (curl) to pull data from JSON (Google Maps API)

Question

I'm fairly new to JSON, and I'm trying to get the latitude and longitude of a geocoded city from the Google Maps API using curl. The function I'm using is:

function geocode($city){    $cityclean = str_replace (" ", "+", $city);    $details_url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=" . $cityclean . "&sensor=false";     $ch = curl_init();    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $details_url);    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);    $geoloc = json_decode(curl_exec($ch), true);     $step1 = $geoloc['results'];    $step2 = $step1['geometry'];    $coords = $step2['location'];     print $coords['lat'];    print $coords['lng'];  } 

The goal of all of that is to pull the lat and lng values from the Results -> Geometry -> Location array of the following JSON:

{   "status": "OK",   "results": [ {     "types": [ "locality", "political" ],     "formatted_address": "Westminster, London, UK",     "address_components": [ {       "long_name": "London",       "short_name": "London",       "types": [ "locality", "political" ]     }, {       "long_name": "Westminster",       "short_name": "Westminster",       "types": [ "administrative_area_level_3", "political" ]     }, {       "long_name": "Greater London",       "short_name": "Greater London",       "types": [ "administrative_area_level_2", "political" ]     }, {       "long_name": "England",       "short_name": "England",       "types": [ "administrative_area_level_1", "political" ]     }, {       "long_name": "United Kingdom",       "short_name": "GB",       "types": [ "country", "political" ]     } ],     "geometry": {       "location": {         "lat": 51.5001524,         "lng": -0.1262362       },       "location_type": "APPROXIMATE",       "viewport": {         "southwest": {           "lat": 51.3493528,           "lng": -0.3783580         },         "northeast": {           "lat": 51.7040647,           "lng": 0.1502295         }       },       "bounds": {         "southwest": {           "lat": 51.3493528,           "lng": -0.3783580         },         "northeast": {           "lat": 51.7040647,           "lng": 0.1502295         }       }     }   } ] } 

However, it doesn't print anything. I know that the function successfully retrieves the JSON from Google and brings it to my server, as I did a print statement for the 'status' value and it returned 'OK'. The problem seems to be when I try and delve deeper into the JSON.

Sorry if it's a straightforward problem, but like I said, I'm new to this and it's driving me crazy now.

Thanks a lot! :)

Answer 1

Note that it seems that results contains an array (with only one item in it, here) of results ; and geometry is one item inside one result.

Here, you can see that results' content is delimited by [] -- which indicates it's an array.

So, you have to first access the first result : $geoloc['results'][0]
Inside of which you'll have the geometry : $geoloc['results'][0]['geometry']

Which will allow you to get the latitude and longitude :

var_dump($geoloc['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lat']); var_dump($geoloc['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lng']); 

I suppose that, depending on the address you've searched on, you will sometimes have more than one item in the results array.

Answer 2

You just need this :

$fullurl = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=1600+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountain+View,+CA&sensor=true"; $string .= file_get_contents($fullurl); // get json content $json_a = json_decode($string, true); //json decoder  echo $json_a['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lat']; // get lat for json echo $json_a['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lng']; // get ing for json