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I am trying to move away from all Google products.

For mapping, I am using AngularJS 1.x and Leaflet.

I was surprised to find that Leaflet does not support geocoding, where I pass an address and get a latitude/longitude. I need that in order to add markers to the map.

I am looking for a Geocoder which:

  • is free for commercial use
  • is stable and likely to stay so for many years
  • has a really simple API, preferably just HTTP GET, which will take a city name or street name and return latitude/longitude (not that I don't really need great accuracy; city level resolution will be enough in some cases)
  • a batch interface is "nice to have", but I will probably just fire off individual requests
  • coverage of the UK will currently suffice, but all of Europe would be "nice to have"

What can you recommend?

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OpenStreetMap, which is free for commercial use, has a geocoding tool called Nominatim. Its API is based on HTTP GET and you have a choice of different formats to return (e.g. JSON, XML).

As an example, consider Stack Overflow's New York address. Open the following URL in your browser: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=110+william+street,+new+york&format=json

and you'll get the following results:

[
  {
    "place_id": 140185133,
    "licence": "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. https://osm.org/copyright",
    "osm_type": "way",
    "osm_id": 278078924,
    "boundingbox": [
      "40.7084229",
      "40.7091243",
      "-74.0071802",
      "-74.0062953"
    ],
    "lat": "40.7087755",
    "lon": "-74.0067691170635",
    "display_name": "110 William Street, 110, William Street, Financial District, Manhattan, Manhattan Community Board 1, New York County, New York City, New York, 10038, USA",
    "class": "building",
    "type": "yes",
    "importance": 0.511
  }
]
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  • I don't understand how I overlooked that :-) Thanks a a 1,000,000
    – Mawg
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 8:58
  • Do you know if it handles batch requests? Can I pass it a list of addresses? I tried multiple q= parameters, but it only processes the last one. Maybe there is another way?
    – Mawg
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 10:03
  • 1
    I don't know of any ...
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 10:28
  • Nvm, I used the answer to this question to let me bind a parameter (company name) to each geocode request and that helps me case; when each of the asynch responses arrives,as well as address data, I have the company name to associate with it. Thanks again for your help :-)
    – Mawg
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 10:32

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