Comments on: Geocoding in the UK

By: wheresrhys

wheresrhys — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:50:07 +0000

Really odd that as the code doesn’t use cookies. Maybe if you’re loading the html page as C:/…/geocode.html instead of http://localhost/…./geocode.html then the ajax would be cross-domain, so allowing cross-domain cookies would allow cross-domain ajax too?

Anyway, glad it worked

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:25:35 +0000

Problem solved … would only show first row … until I allowed ALL cookies in the browser!

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:18:16 +0000

Dave, you appear to have got this working. Can you please send me the contents of your geo directory i.e. the varios html, php, script files.

Thanks

Fred

By: wheresrhys

wheresrhys — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:41:35 +0000

Unfortunately not, and this is more a problem with google's geocoding of UK addresses than with the method itself: http://wheresrhys.co.uk/2009/07/anarchy-in-the-uk/

By: Nik

Nik — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:35:27 +0000

Hi I have a database which contains all the details for england, will this populate the geocodes for each of the cities/towns villages, neighborhoods, etc without having the postcode for them? essentially can it be manipulated to use the town/city names and the other required fields to automatically generate the geocodes for each of the locations accurately?

By: wheresrhys

wheresrhys — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:21:15 +0000

Two things might be happening here:

Off the top of my head, to find an ungeocoded row the sql query looks for entries where lat = '', so null would probably break this. The datatype of this column has to be a string and MySQL by default leaves the default entry of a string as ''
Less likely is that Google's geocoder can't handle strangely formatted postcodes, in which case you'd have to write a script to go through your postcodes putting in a space before the last 3 characters (which I think will correctly format most if not all british postcodes)

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:19:21 +0000

I have a table with the postcodes. When i run the code, it says that it has finished coding, yet it hasnt actually done anything. The postcodes in the table do not have any spaces (i.e. AB123CD as apposed to AB12 3CD) and the lat & lng columns are ‘null’. Does this make any difference?

This is a really useful piece of code, and I would really like to get it to work for me.

By: Mani

Mani — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:26:03 +0000

Just found downloadable UK postcode list alongwith latitude & longitude positions. Website has also good online tools (eventhough they are not helpful in coding)
http://www.freemaptools.com/download-uk-postcode-lat-lng.htm

By: wheresrhys

wheresrhys — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:33:16 +0000

Here’s one idea, scraping the barrel. The data types of your lat and lng columns should be varchar (length of about 12) or a similar text field. Not a number field basically, as this might interfere with the WHERE lat = ” condition in the SQL.

By: Mat

Mat — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:40:52 +0000

Hi,

This looks really good, but I’m having the same problem. It gets to the first row, but then doesn’t do anything. Have you had any progress? My column names and whatnot all work – I can run the queries directly in MySQL – but it only appears to go through the PHP once.

Any progress?

Cheers,

Mat