Calling Nominatim with file_get_contents ..

Question

I used in a PHP script to call the Nominativ API with file_get_contents. This worked excellently until 13.09.2017.

I have tried CURL but no result or error returns.

function file_get_contents_curl($cmd, $query) {
$level=error_reporting();
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$ch = curl_init();
$query= curl_escape($ch,$query);
$url = $cmd.$query;
echo $url.' <--';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the $
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 3);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);       
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
error_reporting($level);
return $data;

}

/*result of echo
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=json&limit=1&addressdetails=1%26email%3Dg%40example.com%26street%3D19%2BAhornweg%26city%3DKoenigswinter%26country%3DDeutschland%26postalcode%3D53639
*/

Can anyone help me with a working solution?

Accepted Answer

PHP's file_get_contents() sends neither HTTP UserAgent nor Referer, which violates the usage policy for the server. You can easily add custom HTTP headers by creating an appropriate stream context like that:

// Create a stream
$opts = array('http'=>array('header'=>"User-Agent: StevesCleverAddressScript 3.7.6\r\n"));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);

// Open the file using the HTTP headers set above
$file = file_get_contents('http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search/q=Rome', false, $context);

For more information see the PHP user manual.

Answer 2

Do you run the script within the https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim/ limits, e.g. Number of requests per second? I see the email parameter is a non-existing email. It's possible you got blocked. That would explain why it stopped working from one day to the next.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem while acquiring coordinates for geocoding. I need to add also my email address to url. I combined info from this: link text and this: link text to get this:

        $url = 'https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search/'.rawurlencode($location).'?format=json&limit=1&email=youremail@gmail.com';

        $data = ''; // empty post
        $opts = array(
            'http' => array(
            'header' => "Content-type: text/html\r\nContent-Length: " . strlen($data) . "\r\n",
            'method' => 'POST'
            ),
        ); 
        // Create a stream
        $context = stream_context_create($opts);
        // Open the file - get the json response using the HTTP headers set above
        $jsonfile = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
        // decode the json 
        if (!json_decode($jsonfile, TRUE)) {return false;}else{
        //if (empty(array_filter($resp))) {return false;}else{
        $resp = json_decode($jsonfile, true);
        //if(is_string($resp)){$resp = 'true';}else{$resp = 'itsnot';}
        // Extract data (e.g. latitude and longitude) from the results    
        $gps['latitude'] = $resp[0]['lat'];
        $gps['longitude'] = $resp[0]['lon'];
        return $gps;}

Answer 4

Cool, thanks to lonvia here's a practical example to get around this nonsense with php. Using the browsers user_agent as a variable.

function OsmAddress() {
    //vars
    $Latitude ='22.56589015';
    $Longitude ='113.9259518';
    $USERAGENT = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

    //main
    $opts = array('http'=>array('header'=>"User-Agent: $USERAGENT\r\n"));
    $context = stream_context_create($opts);
    $url4 = file_get_contents("https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=json&lat=$Latitude&lon=$Longitude&zoom=18&addressdetails=1", false, $context);
    $osmaddress = json_decode($url4);  
    $osmaddress1 = $osmaddress->display_name;
    echo $osmaddress1;
}
OsmAddress();

Calling Nominatim with file_get_contents ..

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