Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth (ExtremeTech)

100 Part II — Instant Gratification

Listing 6-3(continued)

use URI::Escape;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(

agent => “Mozilla/5.0 ;

(X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01”,

);

# Send the query

my $response = $ua->get;

(‘http://maps.google.com/maps?q=’. uri_escape($ARGV[0]));

# Extract the content

my $var = $response->{_content};

# Extract the latitude and longitude

my ($lat,$lng) = ( $var =~ m/GLatLng\(([-\d.]+).*?([-\d.]+)\)/ms );

print “Lat: $lat - Lng: $lng\n”;

if (!defined($lat)) # Show alternates if we can’t find lat/lng

{

# First remove any irrelevant data from the raw text

$var =~ s/.*Did you mean:(.*)/$1/gmi;

# Extract the query values

my (@alternatives) = ($var =~ m/q=(.*?)[&”]/gm);

print “Alternatives:\n”;

# Dedupe results

my $alternates = {};

foreach my $alt (@alternatives)

{

$alt =~ s/\+/ /g;

$alternates->{$alt} = 1;

}

foreach my $alt (keys %{$alternates})

{

print “$alt\n”;

}

}

The script works by supplying a suitable query to the Google system. You then parse the out-

put, first extracting the latitude and longitude (if you can find it). If the correct latitude and

longitude cannot be found, you parse the raw HTML sent back to look for the alternatives

suggested by the Google Maps system. To do this, the script effectively does the opposite of