How to convert an address to a latitude/longitude?

geocoding latitude-longitude street-address
swilc0x picture swilc0x · Sep 19, 2008 · Viewed 156.5k times · Source

How would I go about converting an address or city to a latitude/longitude? Are there commercial outfits I can "rent" this service from? This would be used in a commercial desktop application on a Windows PC with fulltime internet access.

Answer

mopoke picture mopoke · Sep 19, 2008

Google has a geocoding API which seems to work pretty well for most of the locations that they have Google Maps data for.

http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2006/06/geocoding-at-last.html

They provide online geocoding (via JavaScript):

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding

Or backend geocoding (via an HTTP request):

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding_Direct

The data is usually the same used by Google Maps itself. (note that there are some exceptions to this, such as the UK or Israel, where the data is from a different source and of slightly reduced quality)

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