The easy API to get a longitude and latitude from a given city name

Question

I want my vistior to enter a city name then I can get the latitude and longitude from that name. I could not figure out how to get them using google map api. I found world weather online api easy, so I have this json response but cannot walk through it.

{ "search_api" : {
    "result" : [
      { "areaName"   : [ { "value" : "New York" } ], 
        "country"    : [ { "value" : "United States Of America" } ],
        "latitude"   : "40.710",
        "longitude"  : "-74.010", 
        "population" : "8107916",  
        "region"     : [ { "value" : "New York" } ], 
        "weatherUrl" : [ { "value": "http:\/\/free.worldweatheronline.com\/weather\/United-States-Of-America\/2395340\/New-York\/2478232\/info.aspx" } ]
      }, 
      { "areaName"   : [ { "value" : "New York" } ],
        "country"    : [ { "value" : "United States Of America" } ],
        "latitude"   : "32.170",
        "longitude"  : "-95.670",
        "population" : "0",
        "region"     : [ { "value" : "Texas" } ],
        "weatherUrl" : [ { "value": "http:\/\/free.worldweatheronline.com\/weather\/United-States-Of-America\/2395340\/New-York\/2516758\/info.aspx" } ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

This is what I tried:

$.getJSON(url, function(data) {
  var cord = data.search_api.latitude;

  alert(cord);
} );

Can anybody help me out with this or give me a better way to get longitude and latitude from a given city name or address?

That looks okay. What does `console.log(data);` show in the browser's console? — Pekka, Feb 27 '12 at 01:35
pre tag is not part of my code, i thought it was going to organize my code :), — Timmy, Feb 27 '12 at 01:41
Lots of API's will return JSON but is it JSONP? If not you can't access it with javascript due to cross domain policies — charlietfl, Feb 27 '12 at 02:01

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 27 '12 at 01:42

0

Your code doesn't work because you try to jump straight from search_api to latitude when you need to go through the array named result first, e.g.

$.getJSON( url, function( data ) {
  var firstResult = data.search_api.result[ 0 ];

  console.log( "City:",      firstResult.areaName[ 0 ].value, ",",
                             firstResult.region[ 0 ].value
  );
  console.log( "Latitude:",  firstResult.latitude );
  console.log( "Longitude:", firstResult.longitude );
} );

/* Output:
   > City: New York , New York
   > Latitude: 40.710
   > Longitude: -74.010
*/

answered Feb 27 '12 at 01:42

Jordan Running

102,619
17
182
182

That's too bad, but "didn't work" doesn't mean anything to us. What error did you get or what result did you get that you didn't expect? What is the value of `data`? – Jordan Running Feb 27 '12 at 01:48
I want to show the Latitude and Longitude as you did here, but it gives me this "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token :" – Timmy Feb 27 '12 at 01:58
Debug it like you would any syntax error. What line in the code does it refer to? There's no syntax error in the code I posted so it's either in the JSON data (are you sure it's plain JSON?) or somewhere else in your code. – Jordan Running Feb 27 '12 at 15:56

The easy API to get a longitude and latitude from a given city name

1 Answers1