street address to geolocation lat/long

Question

I am considering rChart/LeafLet to create a shiny app for housing sales in my county. There are several hundred houses for sale at any given time. Want to map street address-to-geolocation (lat/long) for all and display them on a map. So, I am looking for a r package, service or database that can map street address to geolocation.

`nominatim` : https://github.com/hrbrmstr/nominatim ; `ggmap::geocode` ; `geocodeHERE::geocodeHERE_simple` ; `geonames` package; also `google r street address geolocation` — hrbrmstr, Sep 10 '15 at 14:52
Excelent article with code example (using package ggmap): http://www.shanelynn.ie/massive-geocoding-with-r-and-google-maps/ — Paulo S. Abreu, Apr 26 '17 at 18:39

score 24 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 10 '15 at 15:24

24

Here is a function based on Harvey's suggestion. It will look for the address and give the coordinates of the first result. Have a look at the structure of x in the function to see other information you can get.

geocodeAdddress <- function(address) {
  require(RJSONIO)
  url <- "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address="
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, address, "&sensor=false", sep = ""))
  x <- fromJSON(url, simplify = FALSE)
  if (x$status == "OK") {
    out <- c(x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lng,
             x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lat)
  } else {
    out <- NA
  }
  Sys.sleep(0.2)  # API only allows 5 requests per second
  out
}

For example:

R> geocodeAdddress("Time Square, New York City")
[1] -73.98722  40.7575

answered Sep 10 '15 at 15:24

maccruiskeen

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why are we building functions when packages exist for the exact same functionality? – hrbrmstr Sep 10 '15 at 15:39
@hrbrmstr I wasn't aware of that package, thanks for the heads up. – maccruiskeen Sep 10 '15 at 15:54
Can you share the package name choff? – Antex Sep 10 '15 at 17:46
It's the one hrbrmstr mentioned in the comment on the question, nominatim. – maccruiskeen Sep 10 '15 at 18:01
Thanks @choff for the function! – Jan 13 '16 at 13:23

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '15 at 14:44

5

I have used Google Geolocation, This is simple to set-up and easy to implement on almost any project:

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/intro

answered Sep 10 '15 at 14:44

Harvey

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For future reference, this belongs in a comment, but I guess you don't have enough rep to do that so OK. – jlhoward Sep 10 '15 at 14:47
1

Thanks Harvey. The goole maps limit the number of request to 10/sec or 2500 a day. Which is fine. is there a way to make a bulk request. Say I send 100 street addresses in and get 100 lon/lat back? – Antex Sep 10 '15 at 15:16
Sorry I should have mentioned there was a limit. but for small applications its not much to worry about. I managed to perform multiple in an iOS app by simply looping requests. Although you may have to limit the speed of this due to multiple connections too fast may lock you out. Sorry I don't know the R specifics! – Harvey Sep 10 '15 at 15:37

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 19 '20 at 19:05

Modified answer to account for the API requirement:

api_key <- c("YOUR_API_KEY")

geocodeAdddress <- function(address) {
  require(RJSONIO)
  url <- "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address="
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, address, sep = ""))
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, "&key=", api_key, sep = ""))
  x <- fromJSON(url, simplify = FALSE)
  print(x$status)
  if (x$status == "OK") {
    out <- c(x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lng,
             x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lat)
  } else {
    out <- NA
  }
  Sys.sleep(0.2)  # API only allows 5 requests per second
  out
}

street address to geolocation lat/long

3 Answers3

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