Archive for GIS

Getting the Lat/Long for a Zipcode

11 Jan, 2006  2 Comments

I’ve uploaded a short Ruby script which uses Google maps to obtain the lat/long given a zipcode. I needed this since the Cartographer RoR plug-in takes coordinates in the form of lat/long and my customers will only provide me with their zipcodes or complete addresses. Obviously in my Rails web-app I’m storing the lat/long in the DB so I don’t repeatedly query Google Maps.

The class simply returns a hash and is trivial to use:

  1. coords = GMap.to_latlng("90210")
  2. lat = coords[:lat]
  3. lng = coords[:lng]

Download zipcode.zip

Updated 2007: This has basically been supplanted by the excellent GeoKit for Rails.