All posts tagged API

I needed to write a function to get a set of co-ordinates from an address, supplied as a string.
Using the Google API, I came up with this:

First, I created a struct, to represent the lat and lon co-ordinates:

public struct Coordinate
{
	private double _latitude;
	private double _longitude;

	public Coordinate(double latitude, double longitude)
	{
		_latitude = latitude;
		_longitude = longitude;
	}

	public double Latitude { get { return _latitude; } set { _latitude = value; } }
	public double Longitude { get { return _longitude; } set { _longitude = value; } }
}

This is a simple representation of a set of latitude and longitude co-ordinates.

The main method, which returns the above Coordinate struct is:

public static Coordinate GetCoordinates(string address)
{
	using (var client = new WebClient())
	{
		Uri uri = YOUR_URI_HERE;

		/* The first number is the status code,
		* the second is the accuracy,
		* the third is the latitude,
		* the fourth one is the longitude.
		*/
		string[] geocodeInfo = client.DownloadString(uri)		.Split(',');

		return new Coordinate(
			Convert.ToDouble(geocodeInfo[2]),
			Convert.ToDouble(geocodeInfo[3]));
	}
}

On line 5, you need to specify your Google API URL, in the format of:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=ADDRESS GOES HERE&output=csv&key=YOUR KEY HERE

And that’s it!

Obviously, there are usage restrictions when using the Google API for this, as outlined on the documentation pages