R: Extracting information from Google Places within the Tidyverse

Question

I've a data frame with locations and I want to append phone numbers and websites to them from Google Places in a pipeable solution.

The closest I've gotten to doing this was using googleway, unlisting the JSON and using regexes to extract the place id, and doing the same again for the phone numbers and email addresses. Is there a more targeted way of doing this?

library(googleway)
library(tidyverse)

set_key("api")

index_no <- c(1,2,3,4)
landmark<- c("Sydney Opera House","Eiffel Tower","Empire State Building","Big Ben")
df <- data.frame(index_no,landmark, stringsAsFactors = F)

df %>%
  rowwise() %>%
  # Place IDs are required for the function beneath
  do(data.frame(., place_id  = unlist(google_places(search_string = .$landmark)))) %>%
  # Place IDs are 27 chars
  filter(grepl("^\\S{27}$", place_id )) %>%
  do(data.frame(., details = unlist(google_place_details(place_id  = .$place_id )))) %>%
  unique() %>%
  # Gets non-Google URls and Phone Numbers
  filter(grepl("(?!.*(google|maps))(^https?.*|^\\+\\d)", details, perl = T )) %>%
  group_by(landmark) %>%
  mutate(seq = 1:n()) %>%
  spread(seq, details) %>%
  rename(phone_number = `1`, website = `2`) %>%
  select(-place_id) %>%
  ungroup()

look in `?access_result` to see if there is an accessor already there to get the information you want. If you want a specific result from the API you can always [add it](https://github.com/SymbolixAU/googleway/blob/master/R/results_access.R), or [request it](https://github.com/SymbolixAU/googleway/issues) — SymbolixAU, Jul 29 '19 at 02:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 12 '19 at 16:56

I doubt there is. It is a two step process at the side of Google API (see the documentation: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details):

You need to :

get the unique placeid (via Place Search call)
get the contact details for your placeid (via Place Details call)

You might have more control over the process if you pasted your url yourself and executed it via httr (the Google API is known for breaking changes, and hard for R packages to keep pace with) and you can wrap the ugly piece of code in your own function, making the call tidy - but ultimately it will have to be 2 API calls.

R: Extracting information from Google Places within the Tidyverse

1 Answers1