How to determine if address doesn't exists in Google Maps Api v3

Question

Hi I'm trying to find out if an address exists in a City+Province+Country using google's maps API v3 geocoding webservice. I've seen that Google always returns something. For example, if I try to find an existing address: "Colon 100, Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina" using: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Colon%20100%20,C%C3%B3rdoba,C%C3%B3rdoba,Argentina&sensor=false I get a something. But when I try to find and non existing address like, "nonexistingaddres 2, Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina" using : http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=nonexistingaddress%20100,C%C3%B3rdoba,C%C3%B3rdoba,Argentina&sensor=false I also get a result. I'dont know how to find out if "nonexisting" street exists or not by just analyzing the google's response. Thanks in advance, Mono.

possible duplicate of Address validation using Google Maps API — geocodezip
I'm not trying to actually validate and address. I don't want to show any result because Google didn't find the correct street. If street doesn't exists then I don't want to display it. — Mono

snipe snipe · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-17T22:28:37

I know this question is old, but I figured I'd answer it anyway for people still looking. The best way to handle this in my experience is to look at the API response. I don't use Google Maps for address verification, just for finding coordinates, but I need to fail properly if the address someone has provided isn't valid (at least as far as Google is concerned), since it won't return usable latitude/longitude for my app to consume.

In PHP, I do something like this:

   public static function  latlong($location) {

        if ($location!='') {
            try {
                $json = file_get_contents('http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address='.urlencode($location));
                $parsedjson = json_decode($json, true);

                if (key_exists(0,$parsedjson['results'])) {
                    $lat_long_array = $parsedjson['results'][0]['geometry']['location'];
                    return $lat_long_array;
                } else {
                    return false;
                }
            } catch (Exception $e) {
                //echo 'Caught exception: ',  $e->getMessage(), "\n";
                return false;
            }
        }


    }

Hope that helps any Googlers who end up here.

How to determine if address doesn't exists in Google Maps Api v3

2 Answers