Another things about postcode API

[xoggoth]

Following zazou's post about postcode lookup APIs , thought I'd look into it. Found quite good thing here but documentation is sparse, they seem to assume you know all about API which I don't.

https://getaddress.io/Documentation

I understand what json is and a reference https://api.getAddress.io/v2/uk/SE192BB/14/?api-key={my api-key} produces a file 14.json with address details which I could then parse easily enough using file_get_contents in PHP.

What I can't figure out is how to get the content into the page, it keeps treating it as a download and opens it in Visual Studio!

Any tips (without using jquery/jfiddle etc) ? Ta.

[NickFitz]

The basic idea would be:

• Get the content returned from the API endpoint (https://api.getAddress.io/v2/uk/SE192BB/14/?api-key={my api-key} in this case) into a variable - you say you're using PHP's file_get_contents, so presumably this bit is working. (An alternative would be to use PHP's curl functions.)
  
  
• You now have the response as a JSON string which can be parsed into an object, so go ahead and do that using json_decode.
  
  
• Now the response is an object, you can get the actual data out of it; this depends on how you want to display the data, as with any other object.

My PHP is a little rusty, but something like

<?php
$postcode_api_json_response = file_get_contents('https://api.getAddress.io/v2/uk/SE192BB/14/?api-key={my api-key}');

// Have to make sure it's UTF-8; it probably is, but the call to utf8_encode is a belt-&-braces thing
$postcode_api_data = json_decode(utf8_encode($postcode_api_json_response));

// Example: Turn the latitude and longitude into a string
$postcode_lat_lon = $postcode_api_data->Latitude . ',' . $postcode_api_data->Longitude;

// Example: Get the array of addresses into a separate variable
$addresses_for_postcode = $postcode_api_data->Addresses;
?>

To display the addresses in an HTML select drop-down list using the variable from the last line above, something like:

<label for='postcode'>Postcode:</label>
<select name='postcode' id='postcode'>
<?php foreach $address in $addresses_for_postcode: ?>
  <option><?= htmlspecialchars($address) ?></option>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</select>

should do the trick (barring any obvious syntax errors - I haven't actually run any of the above).

Note the use of htmlspecialchars: there's always the chance of something unexpected in any data you get from a remote service, so making sure it doesn't break anything on output is important!

[RSoles]

Other languages are available:-
https://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html

[xoggoth]

Brill! Why do I need to search for such things on Google when I've got NickFitz on CUK? Works great, thanks!

I'm a lazy programmer so PHP works fine for me, always find I bang it together any old how and it works but thanks RSoles.

[original PM]

Brill! Why do I need to search for such things on Google when I've got NickFitz on CUK? Works great, thanks!

I'm a lazy programmer so PHP works fine for me, always find I bang it together any old how and it works but thanks RSoles.