README

This is mainly aimed at retrieving coordinates (latitude, longitude) of a location (address, place).

It is based on geocoder-php (https://github.com/geocoder-php/Geocoder) and tries to use the provider matching our requirements:

• The provider must allow geocoding output storage
• The provider usage must be free (for few queries)

REM: A cache is used so as to meet as far as possible usage limitation defined by the providers

Installation

At the root of your project type

composer require phpfacile/geocoding

Or add "phpfacile/geocoding": "^1.0" to the "require" part of your composer.json file

"require": {
    "phpfacile/geocoding": "^1.0"
}

Providers comparison

Usage

$geocodingService = new GeocodingService($cfg, $cacheDir);

$cfg = [
    'geonames' => [
        'username' => '<replace with geonames username>',
    ],
    'nominatim' => [
        'rootUrl' => 'https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org',
        'userAgent' => '<replace with a user-agent>',
    ]
];

$cacheDir.'/nominatim' must exist (ex: if $cacheDir='/cache' then '/cache/nominatim' folder must exist and be writable)

Actually, in the current implementation, in any case nominatim is the preferred provider.

$locations = $this->geocodingService->getLocationsByAddress('Etretat, France');
foreach ($locations as $location) {
    var_dump($location);
}

$locations = $this->geocodingService->getPlacesByCountryAndPlaceName('France', 'Etretat');
foreach ($locations as $location) {
    var_dump($location);
}

Disclaimer

Nominatim may stop its service at any moment

Troubleshooting

If ever you modify the code so as to use geonames, you have to know that the following error message is silently ignored by the geonames provider (https://github.com/geocoder-php/geonames-provider)

{"status":{"message":"user account not enabled to use the free webservice. Please enable it on your account page: http://www.geonames.org/manageaccount ","value":10}}

Todo

• Manage localisation
• Remove unexpected (from a human point of view) results (for example, with nominatim, a query for "Paris, France" currently returns an entry with type="city" and an other entry almost identical but with type="administrative")