Ultimate Geo Coder – a PHP library inteface to miscellaneous geo coding services

Sometimes we may need to know a geocode of some specific postal location. For example, you have some stores/restaurants catalogue and want to show objects locations on a map. Then, you will need to call some service for map marker coordinates. This small library could help you to get reliable geocode results for most of user-provided postal addresses.

At this moment (version 1.0) this library can use Google Maps API, Yahoo Maps Services, Geocoder.us and Geocoder.ca services, but it is easily extensible and I can almost any services there. So, if you know some other services, that providing longitude/latitude pair by postal address, drop me a note and I will try to add its support to library.

Using UltimateGeoCoder library you can ask some specific addresses or simply call library-embedded service multiplexing function, that will try appropriate services and then will return results to you (this approach is really reliable comparing to use of one service).

Prerequisites: PHP 5.0+ with simplexml and fread() from URLs support. If you want to use curl for HTTP-requests, you can simply use my class as base for yours and override string fetchURL($url) method to change the way URLs are fetched.

Download: Latest version of library is 1.0 (September, 7, 2006). You can get it here: Ultimate Geo Coder v. 1.0