street address to geolocation lat/long

Question

I am considering rChart/LeafLet to create a shiny app for housing sales in my county. There are several hundred houses for sale at any given time. Want to map street address-to-

Answer 1

Modified answer to account for the API requirement:

api_key <- c("YOUR_API_KEY")

geocodeAffffdress <- function(address) {
  require(RJSONIO)
  url <- "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address="
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, address, sep = ""))
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, "&key=", api_key, sep = ""))
  x <- fromJSON(url, simplify = FALSE)
  print(x$status)
  if (x$status == "OK") {
    out <- c(x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lng,
             x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lat)
  } else {
    out <- NA
  }
  Sys.sleep(0.2)  # API only allows 5 requests per second
  out
}

Answer 2

I have used Google Geolocation, This is simple to set-up and easy to implement on almost any project:

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/intro

Answer 3

Here is a function based on Harvey's suggestion. It will look for the address and give the coordinates of the first result. Have a look at the structure of x in the function to see other information you can get.

geocodeAffffdress <- function(address) {
  require(RJSONIO)
  url <- "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address="
  url <- URLencode(paste(url, address, "&sensor=false", sep = ""))
  x <- fromJSON(url, simplify = FALSE)
  if (x$status == "OK") {
    out <- c(x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lng,
             x$results[[1]]$geometry$location$lat)
  } else {
    out <- NA
  }
  Sys.sleep(0.2)  # API only allows 5 requests per second
  out
}

For example:

R> geocodeAffffdress("Time Square, New York City")
[1] -73.98722  40.7575