Extract lat/long coordinates from a php string - php

Question

I need to extract latitude and longitude coordinates from a string using php. The string will always be formatted as such:
"(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)"
However the length of each value will vary from use to use. What's the best way to extract the values? Thanks!

Answer 1

You may use sscanf to do this:
sscanf($string, '"(%f, %f)"', $lat, $lng);
Test:
php > sscanf('"(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)"', '"(%f, %f)"', $lat, $lng);
php > var_dump($lat, $lng);
float(42.327832989891)
float(-70.99989162915)

Answer 2

$withoutParentheses = substr($string, 1, -1);
$coordinates = explode(', ', $coordinates);
$longitude = floatval($coordinates[0]);
$latitude = floatval($coordinates[1]);

Answer 3

You could use a regular expression to extract the numbers from the brackets and then use the explode command to split the numbers into an array.
Your regex would be something like
/(-?[0-9]+.[0-9]+, -?[0-9]+.[0-9]+)/
and your delimiter for the explode command would be a comma.

Answer 4

This is what I came up with on my own:
function LatFromString($mCenterString){
//(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)
$mLatLong = explode(",", $mCenterString);
$mLat = '';
if(count($mLatLong) == 2){
$mLat = substr($mLatLong[0], 1);
}
return $mLat;
}
function LongFromString($mCenterString){
//(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)
$mLatLong = explode(",", $mCenterString);
$mLat = '';
if(count($mLatLong) == 2){
$mLong = substr($mLatLong[1], 0, -1);
}
return $mLong;
}
How does this look?

Answer 5

You could do something like this:
$str = "(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)";
function extractlatlong($str){
$latlong = explode(",",$str);
if(count($latlong) == 2){
$lat = preg_replace("%[^0-9.]%","",$latlong[0]);
$long = preg_replace("%[^0-9.]%","",$latlong[1]);
return array("lat"=>$lat,"long"=>$long);
} else {
return NULL;
}
}
print_r(extractlatlong($str));

Answer 6

If you want to use sscanf() (and I probably would), but don't want to lose any precision from casting the numeric values as floats, then use a couple of negated character classes. You don't' have to match the trailing ) to extract what you need.
Code: (Demo)
$latlon = "(42.32783298989135, -70.99989162915041)";
sscanf($latlon, '(%[^,], %[^)]', $lat, $lon);
var_export([$lat, $lon]);
Output as an array of strings:
array (
0 => '42.32783298989135',
1 => '-70.99989162915041',
)
Or if you just want an indexed array of the two values like the above output:
var_export(sscanf($latlon, '(%[^,], %[^)]'));