Tag Archive: google


Google Charts-like Provincial Data Map For Canada

Filed Under: PHP, Programming by Andrew — 5 Comments
May 3, 2010

Map of Canada chart with province value colour coding.

This is PHP class I developed for work when I needed a Canada-specific map chart in some reporting tools I was creating. Obviously Google’s Map Charts API would’ve been my first choice, but it didn’t support Canada as it’s zoom level for reporting province-based data sets.

This is where I sat down, thought about a quick and dirty way to create this chart and went to work. I was able to create a chart as show on the right, with full control of output dimensions and colours.

Before I jump right into the full code, I want give a brief explanation of some of the techniques I used to accomplish this task.

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Retrieving coordinates of two addresses using Google Maps and calculating distance

Filed Under: PHP, Programming by Andrew — Leave a comment
April 30, 2010

So here’s a quick couple snippets of code that will allow you to retrieve the coordinates of two locations using Google Maps API — no API key necessary.

This first function will return the coordinates of specific address (I find pretty much anything works, whether it’s a full address with street number, or just a postal code, or simply a city name) as an array of coordinates:



function getCoordinates($address) {
  $url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=" . urlencode($address)
         . "&output=json";
  $result = file_get_contents($url);
  $result = json_decode($result, 1);
  if (isset($result['Placemark'])) {
    list($lat, $long) = $result['Placemark'][0]['Point']['coordinates'];
  } else {
    $lat = $long = false;
  }
  return array($lat, $long);
}

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