Google Geocode returns blank string on remote server - works fine locally

Question

I'm trying to implement a service that gets the GPS coordinates of a provided address, so I came up with the following, which works fine locally. However, when I tried to implement it on a hosting provider, all of a sudden the function fails, as no results are returned from Google - not even a blank array, just nothing.

I assume it's something blocked via the web host, but am not sure what to even look for.

Function:

function getCoordinates($Address, $APIKey) {
$BaseURL = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?key=".$APIKey."&address=";
$data = @file_get_contents($BaseURL.str_ireplace(" ","+",$Address));
//echo "Data:".$data."<br>";
$jsondata = json_decode($data,true);

//echo "<pre>";
//print_r($jsondata);
//echo "</pre>";
switch($jsondata["status"]) {
    case "OK" :
        if (count($jsondata["results"]) > 1) {
            return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Multiple results were returned");
        }
        else {
            if (isset($jsondata["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"])) {
                return array("status" => "SUCCESS","latitude" => $jsondata["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lat"],"longitude" => $jsondata["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lng"]);
            }
        }
        return $jsondata["results"];
        break;
    case "ZERO_RESULTS" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Zero Results were returned");
        break;
    case "OVER_QUERY_LIMIT" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "API Key is over the daily limit. It will automatically try again tomorrow");
        break;
    case "REQUEST_DENIED" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Request was denied");
        break;
    case "INVALID_REQUEST" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Invalid request, typically because the address is missing");
        break;
    case "UNKNOWN_ERROR" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Unknown error, Request could not be processed due to a Google server error. It may work again if you try later.");
        break;
    case "ERROR" :
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => "Error, the request timed out");
        break;
    default:
        $Message = array("Failure",print_r($jsondata));
        return array("status" => "FAIL", "message" => $Message);
        break;
}

}

Called via:

$LocationCoordinates = getCoordinates("123 Main Street, Toronto, ON", [[$MapsAPIKey]]);

For testing purposes, I uncommented out the 4 lines close to the top of the function and the first returned the word 'Data' with nothing following. The next three lines, expectedly just returned the corresponding 'pre' tags.

Checked the console log and there are no errors indicated. I tried a quick client side script on the server and it seems to work fine.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 12 '17 at 15:20

This ended up being because the 'allow_url_fopen' setting was disabled on the remote server, effectively disabling the 'file_get_contents' piece of my function. I was able to check this via the hosting's phpinfo page, but can also be done as Marcin Orlowski stated via how to check if allow_url_fopen is enabled or not.

I was able to workaround this by modifying the function to use cURL instead.

I essentially know nothing about cURL but I replaced this line, in my function:

$data = file_get_contents($BaseURL.str_ireplace(" ","+",$Address));

with

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $BaseURL.str_ireplace(" ","+",$Address));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);

While it not longer works on my local machine (because I don't have cURL installed/configured), it works on the remote server, which is the most important.

Google Geocode returns blank string on remote server - works fine locally

1 Answers1