Question

I am trying to call the Google Maps geocoding API, to get a formatted address from a lat/long pair, and then log it to the console. I am trying to get the first ‘formatted_address’ item that gets returned for a given location.
I am simple unable to extract that item from the JSON, I have no idea why. The line of code needed to extract the data would be greatly appreciated.

The javascript:

//Gets the current location of the user
function getLocation()
{
    if (navigator.geolocation)
    {
        navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(showPosition);
    }

}

function showPosition(position)
{
    var latitude = position.coords.latitude;
    var longitude = position.coords.longitude;

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "ReportIncident.aspx/ReverseGeocode",
        data: "{latitude:" + latitude + ",longitude:" + longitude + "}",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",
        success: function (returnedData)
        {
         // console.log(/****formatted_address Here Please****/);
        }
    });
}

The C#:

        [WebMethod]
        public static string ReverseGeocode(decimal latitude, decimal longitude)
        {
            // Create the web request  

            string url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=" + latitude + "," + longitude +
                         "&sensor=true";
            HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;

            // Get response  
            using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
            {
                // Get the response stream  
                StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

                // Console application output  
                return reader.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }

Answer 1

Your JSON is escaped because you’re returning a string from your WebMethod, and not letting the built in JavascriptSerializer do it’s thing.

roughly, you’re seeing this:

"\{ /*data*/ \}"

instead of this:

{ /*data*/ }

You can fix this by running the returned string through eval() but note that I’m not recommending it… just saying you can

EDIT:

 $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "ReportIncident.aspx/ReverseGeocode",
    data: "{latitude:" + latitude + ",longitude:" + longitude + "}",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "json",
    success: function (returnedData)
    {
        var realReturnedData = eval(returnedData.d);
        //realReturnedData now has the google maps data structure you're expecting
    }
});

Again… eval is evil (if you don’t 100% trust the source). I would recommend returning a different data type from your webmethod…

EDIT 2:

[WebMethod]
public static MyClass ReverseGeocode(decimal lat, decimal long) {
   MyClass obj = new MyClass();
   //do stuff
   return obj;
}

But my real question is why are you doing this with a webservice call to your server? You can directly do geocoding from Javascript to google’s API https://google-developers.appspot.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-reverse