I need a list of countries, states & cities based on a collection of lat/long values I have. I need to store this information in a manner that hierarchy is preserve and without duplicates (e.g. "USA" and "United States" and "United States of America" are the same country; I only want one instance of this country in my database).
Is this possible to do with Google Map API?
You have a basic answer here: Get city name using geolocation
But for what you are looking for, i'd recommend this way.
Only if you also need administrative_area_level_1,to store different things for Paris, Texas, US and Paris, Ile-de-France, France and provide a manual fallback:
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There is a problem in Michal's way, in that it takes the first result, not a particular one. He uses results[0]. The way I see fit (I just modified his code) is to take ONLY the result whose type is "locality", which is always present, even in an eventual manual fallback in case the browser does not support geolocation.
His way: fetched results are different from using http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=bucharest&sensor=false than from using http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=44.42514,26.10540&sensor=false (searching by name / searching by lat&lng)
This way: same fetched results.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<title>Reverse Geocoding</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var geocoder;
if (navigator.geolocation) {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(successFunction, errorFunction);
}
//Get the latitude and the longitude;
function successFunction(position) {
var lat = position.coords.latitude;
var lng = posit