NYCPHP Meetup

[John Corry]

Attn: cross posted to ATLPHP

I am working on a project that will require running about 3500 street
addresses through a geocoder application to return lat/long pairs.

My first idea was to use cURL to post the address to the http://geocoder.us/
site...once for each address, parsing the returned result to get lat/long
and store those with the address record in my db.

I haven't tried it yet because a quiet but persistent voice is whispering to
me that looping through 3500 records and opening a cURL session to another
website to screen-scrape the results is somehow not a good idea...for my
server or theirs. I don't know enough about all of the issues to be able to
articulate why (perhaps you want to enlighten me)...just that it seems like
a bad idea.

Does anyone know a better way? I can't pay for a commercial service for this
but if there's a faster, more efficient means of usign the free services
available I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks,
John Corry