Distance of Location from a zip (postal) code

Question

The Android API has Location.distanceBetween(), which accepts two lat/lon values and returns a distance in meters. Is there a way that I could get this distance with only having a zip (postal) code for one of my points?

You can use the Google Maps API to get the lat/long for a zip code. It is the geographic center of the zip code IIRC. — Erik Nedwidek, Nov 11 '13 at 23:19

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

1

You may want to use Android's Geocoder API. Something like this should work:

String locationName = zipCode + ", " + countryName;
Geocoder geoCoder = new Geocoder(context, Locale.getDefault());     
try {
    List<Address> address = geoCoder.getFromLocationName(locationName, 1);    
    double latitude = address.get(0).getLatitude();
    double longitude = address.get(0).getLongitude();
    Location.distanceBetween(...);
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

You need to include the country's name because of this: Get latitude and longitude based on zip using Geocoder class in Android

edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

Community

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answered Nov 11 '13 at 23:31

jlhonora

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It seems that `Geocoder` can be a little flaky. It was timing out for me frequently. [This SO answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/15236615/1747491) discusses a solution. I am actually going to just populate a database table instead, since this is very static data. – theblang Nov 12 '13 at 16:23

Distance of Location from a zip (postal) code

1 Answers1