Retrieving Lat & Lon from an address without a map

What you are after is called "Geocoding".
There are many paid and free services available for different countries. As i'm sure your aware you can sort of acheive this using VE but it more about showing that location on a map. Microsoft have a web service called mappoint that offers this functionlaity at a price. I would do some searching for Geocoding for the region of the world you are interested it. Most likely if it is not for profit it will be free or else you'll pay per geocode :(
John.

I have used a local.live.com/search.ashx service to get the geocoding in my application. Here is the source code:

Make sure you have added:

using System.Net;

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

using System.Web;

using System.Web.Configuration;

using System.Web.Security;

using System.Xml;

using System.Xml.XPath;

using System.IO;

--

privatevoid button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

double Latitude = 0;

double Longitude = 0;

GeoCode(textBox1.Text, out Latitude, out Longitude);

lblLat.Text = Latitude.ToString();

lblLong.Text = Longitude.ToString();

}

privatebool GeoCode(string Address, outdouble Latitude, outdouble Longitude)

{

bool RetVal = true;

double long2 = 0;

double long1 = 0;

double lat2 = 0;

double lat1 = 0;

Latitude = 0;

Longitude = 0;

string text1 = "a=&b=" + Address + "&c=0.0&d=0.0&e=0.0&f=0.0&g=&i=&r=0";

string text2 = DoSearchRequest(text1);

if ((text2 == null) || (text2 == string.Empty))

{

returnfalse;

}

Regex regex1 = newRegex(@"SetViewport\((?<lat1>\S+),(?<long1>\S+),(?<lat2>\S+),(?<long2>\S+)\)");

Match match1 = regex1.Match(text2);

if (!match1.Success)

{

returnfalse;

}

lat1 = double.Parse(match1.Groups["lat1"].Value);

long1 = double.Parse(match1.Groups["long1"].Value);

lat2 = double.Parse(match1.Groups["lat2"].Value);

long2 = double.Parse(match1.Groups["long2"].Value);

// we use the midpoint of the viewport here

Latitude = (lat1 + lat2) / 2;

Longitude = (long1 + long2) / 2;

return RetVal;

}

privatestring DoSearchRequest(string searchParams)

{

string text1 = string.Empty;

HttpWebRequest request1 = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://local.live.com/search.ashx");

request1.Method = "POST";

request1.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

UTF8Encoding encoding1 = newUTF8Encoding();

byte[] buffer1 = encoding1.GetBytes(searchParams);

request1.ContentLength = buffer1.Length;

try

{

Stream stream1 = request1.GetRequestStream();

stream1.Write(buffer1, 0, buffer1.Length);

stream1.Close();

text1 = GetSearchResults(request1);

}

catch (WebException)

{

}

return text1;

}

privatestring GetSearchResults(HttpWebRequest searchRequest)

{

string text1 = string.Empty;

HttpWebResponse response1 = (HttpWebResponse)searchRequest.GetResponse();

Stream stream1 = response1.GetResponseStream();

Encoding encoding1 = Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");

StreamReader reader1 = newStreamReader(stream1, encoding1);

char[] chArray1 = newchar[0x100];

for (int num1 = reader1.Read(chArray1, 0, 0x100); num1 > 0; num1 = reader1.Read(chArray1, 0, 0x100))

{

string text2 = newstring(chArray1, 0, num1);

text1 = text1 + text2;

}

response1.Close();

return text1;

}

Excellent, SVadali Thanks!

SoulSolutions wrote:

Thats really awesome Svadali. Thanks for sharing the code. Now I wonder if you can use the service to do reverse geocoding..... John

John, I tried to reverse Geocode using this service.. but could not get any information back... will try again some other time...

Uauh..

this code is great.

I need one link like http://local.live.com/search.ashx that retrive the distance between 2 points. Anyone knows if it possible?

Thanks

Hi,
Did you convert the code to VB.Net? If so would you please share it?

Thanks