Question

I just need to fetch some geo data for a given city, i’m not interested (and i don’t know) the address. Sending a request like this:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=fake,%20USA&sensor=false

will match a street with whe word fake in it, somewhere in USA. How can i match only cities and get ZERO_RESULTS response if there is no city with that name?

Answer 1

You can’t do this with the Geocoding API unfortunately, from the docs page:

Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA”) into geographic coordinates (like latitude 37.423021 and longitude -122.083739)

The API will always look for a specific address and if it can’t find an exact match from the string you provide it will always make a ‘best effort’ guess as to what you meant to try and find one. Only if it can’t make this reasonable guess wil it return ZERO_RESULTS.