Question

I’m aware of the JSON output format as given by Google

However, I’m sometimes getting a slightly different format. This is from the results variable in the callback function of gecoder.geocode({'address': address}, callback)

"location": {
          "Za": 37.3492097,
          "$a": -122.03260190000003
        },

…

"viewport": {
          "aa": {
            "b": 37.329901,
            "f": 37.37543489999999
          },
          "ba": {
            "b": -122.06526500000001,
            "f": -121.99577999999997
          }
        }

Notice the keys under location, bounds and viewport – they are different from what’s standard. This is a problem for me because I need to send this JSON over an AJAX call and to my server and parse it and my parser can’t take “$a” as a valid key name.

Is this normal or am I missing something?

EDIT:
I’m on a cloud hosted platform (salesforce.com). We’re using the Javascript API v3. I was able to replicate this issue from a local HTML file.
I’m now thinking it might be because I’m behind a corporate proxy. Anyone faced this before?

Answer 1

As pointed out in a comment on the bug report and on the API documentation, the response object in the callback is not pure JSON. In order to get a JSON object, I needed to create one myself like below:

//assume status is ok

var bestResult = getBestResultFromJSON(results);

var bounds = {'northeast' : {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}, 'southwest' : {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}};
var location = {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0};
var viewport = {'northeast' : {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}, 'southwest' : {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}};
// bounds not always available (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference#GeocoderGeometry)
if(bestResult.geometry.hasOwnProperty(bounds)) {
    bounds.southwest.lat = bestResult.geometry.bounds.getSouthWest().lat();
    bounds.southwest.lng = bestResult.geometry.bounds.getSouthWest().lng();
    bounds.northeast.lat = bestResult.geometry.bounds.getNorthEast().lat();
    bounds.northeast.lng = bestResult.geometry.bounds.getNorthEast().lng();
}
else {
    bounds = null;
}                       

viewport.southwest.lat = bestResult.geometry.viewport.getSouthWest().lat();
viewport.southwest.lng = bestResult.geometry.viewport.getSouthWest().lng();
viewport.northeast.lat = bestResult.geometry.viewport.getNorthEast().lat();
viewport.northeast.lng = bestResult.geometry.viewport.getNorthEast().lng();

location.lat = bestResult.geometry.location.lng();
location.lng = bestResult.geometry.location.lng();

var jsonResults = {'results' : [{'address_components' : bestResult.address_components,
              'formatted_address': bestResult.formatted_address,
              'geometry' : {'bounds' : bounds, 'location' : location, 'location_type' : bestResult.location_type, 'viewport' : viewport},
              'types' : bestResult.types}], 'status' : status};