Thursday, March 11th, 2010
YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScript
Category: Geo, JavaScript
, Library
As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting their head around them I thought it a good idea to build a small JavaScript library that does the job for them.
I give you the YQL Geo library (and its source on GitHub). Using this library you can do the following:
- Detecting the visitor's location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
- Find geo location from text
- Find location from lat/lon pair
- Find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
- Get the location for a certain IP number
And all of that in pure JavaScript. For example:
JAVASCRIPT:
-
yqlgeo.get(
-
'paris,fr',
-
function(o){
-
console.log(o);
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}
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)
Will get you:
JAVASCRIPT:
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"place":{
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"lang":"en-US",
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"uri":"http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/615702",
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"woeid":"615702",
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"placeTypeName":{
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"code":"7",
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"content":"Town"
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},
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"name":"Paris",
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"country":{
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"code":"FR",
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"type":"Country",
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"content":"France"
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},
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"admin1":{
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"code":"",
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"type":"Region",
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"content":"Ile-de-France"
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},
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"admin2":{
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"code":"FR-75",
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"type":"Department",
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"content":"Paris"
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},
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"admin3":null,
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"locality1":{
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"type":"Town",
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"content":"Paris"
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},
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"locality2":null,
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"postal":null,
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"centroid":{
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"latitude":"48.856918",
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"longitude":"2.341210"
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},
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"boundingBox":{
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"southWest":{
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"latitude":"48.658291",
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"longitude":"2.086790"
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},
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"northEast":{
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"latitude":"49.046940",
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"longitude":"2.637910"
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}
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}
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}
Other uses:
This gets the name and the country of a lat/lon pair:
JAVASCRIPT:
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yqlgeo.get(33.748,-84.393,function(o){
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alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content);
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})
This finds the visitor's location (on W3C geo API enabled browsers it asks them to share it - otherwise it detects the IP and locates this one on the planet)
JAVASCRIPT:
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yqlgeo.get('visitor',function(o){
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alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content +
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' (' + o.place.centroid.latitude + ',' +
-
o.place.centroid.longitude + ')'
-
);
-
});
Read all about it on my blog and enjoy!
Related Content:
4.7 rating from 24 votes
Chris, your blog throws a warning about malware in Chromium. When I visit anyway, I get some pdf file downloaded automatically (myreadme.php.pdf) which I deleted on the assumption that it’s malware. Chromium then gives a warning box saying “this site wants to download multiple files to your computer: allow/deny”.
All of which is to say, I think you’ve got some funky shit going down at your blog that you ought to take a look at.
If media temple have a vulnerability nothing in the world is safe anymore… :D
Awesome.
Hello Christian!
Your library is great, became a standard, and I’ve been using it for a long time now!
However, with recent changes to the YQL, it doesn’t work anymore, when you try to get geo-info from IP.
And this is because querying flickr.places from YQL fails now, no matter what. Thus geo.places can’t get a woeid to query.
Please notice that pidgets.geoip returns the latitude and longitude correctly from a given IP.
Can you think of any workarounds? You are the only one I depend on! :)