html5 getting and using coordinates to get address without map - php

Question

I want to get the address of the user abit more precisely than what IP shows it to be, so I used HTML geocoder which gets me the lat and long - so far so good. However i want to get the address from this without displaying any map just the street adress - city - country as plain text to do some work in background. So far as I see google reverse geocoding is always involved with displaying a map. So is there a way to get around this? I could use the php function below but i just cant pass the html 5 var to php as it is.
php
function GetAddress( $lat, $lng )
{
// Construct the Google Geocode API call
//
$URL = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=${lat},${lng}&sensor=false";
// Extract the location lat and lng values
//
$data = file( $URL );
foreach ($data as $line_num => $line)
{
if ( false != strstr( $line, "\"formatted_address\"" ) )
{
$addr = substr( trim( $line ), 22, -2 );
break;
}
}
return $addr;
}
$address = GetAddress();
print_r($address);
?>

Answer 1

The approach I would take would be something akin to this...(tested and works)
<div id='geo_results'></div>
<script type='text/javascript' charset='utf-8'>
window.onload=function(){
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition( geo_success, geo_failure );
function geo_success(pos){
var lat=pos.coords.latitude;
var lng=pos.coords.longitude;
var xhr=new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
if( xhr.readyState==4 && xhr.status==200 ){
geo_callback.call( this, xhr.responseText );
}
}
xhr.open( 'GET', '/fetch.php?lat='+lat+'&lng='+lng, true );
xhr.send( null );
}
function geo_failure(){
alert('failed');
}
function geo_callback(r){
var json=JSON.parse(r);
/* process json data according to needs */
document.getElementById('geo_results').innerHTML=json.results[0].formatted_address;
console.info('Address: %s',json.results[0].formatted_address);
}
}
</script>
and the php page would send the request to google via curl
/* fetch.php */
<?php
/*
Modified only to filter supplied variables to help avoid nasty surprises
*/
$options=array( 'flags' => FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH | FILTER_FLAG_ENCODE_HIGH );
$lat=filter_input( INPUT_GET, 'lat', FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED, $options );
$lng=filter_input( INPUT_GET, 'lng', FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED, $options );
$url="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng={$lat},{$lng}&sensor=false";
$curl=curl_init( $url );
/*
If CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is set to FALSE
there is no need to echo the response
at the end
*/
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, TRUE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FORBID_REUSE, TRUE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, FALSE );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'curl-geolocation' );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 90 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE );
$response=curl_exec( $curl );
echo $response;
?>