[SOLVED] How with laravel 10 factory make valid place lat, lng?

How with laravel 10 factory make valid place lat, lng?

On laravel 10 site with factory I make a lot of points to show them on Leaflet map :

        $city = $faker->city;
        $lat = $faker->latitude;
        $lng = $faker->longitude;

But looks city name and point are different I need city name with valid lat/lon. If possible wit some country defined, as for any person I have a country (2 char code). ?

"laravel/framework": "^10.48.12",
“8.0.36-0ubuntu0.22.04.1”

Thanks in advance!

Solution

There are many lists out there with cities and there according latitude and longitude values:

I have found this one. It is quite old but should have enough entries to get you going: https://github.com/bahar/WorldCityLocations?tab=readme-ov-file

Or this one: https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities. It has a free version, which requires attribution, where you can download a CSV or XLSX file and retrieve the data from there. Here is an example of how I read the data and saved only the necessary data into a JSON file. You can then use a random city from that JSON file.

$file = fopen(storage_path('worldcities.csv'), 'r');

$cities = [];
$row = 1;
while (($data = fgetcsv($file)) !== false) {
   if($row === 1) {
      $row++;
      continue;
   }

   $cities[] = [
       'city' => $data[0],
       'lat' => $data[2],
       'lng' => $data[3],
   ];

   $row++;
}
fclose($file);

Storage::put('cities.json', json_encode($cities));

But you have to be careful because of the huge amount of entries. Another way to do so, would be to read the CSV file every time and choose a random row bigger than one, which might be more memory efficient. Of course, you can save the entries in the DB as well. It all depends on your preferences.