Calculating Distance Between Zip Codes in PHP

Calculating distance between zip codes in PHP

You can also try hitting a web service to calc the distance. Let someone else do the heavy lifting.

https://www.zipcodeapi.com/API#distance

Calculating driving distance using zip codes

There isn't a whole lot out there that's free, other than Google Maps. The MapQuest API may give you what you need. Here's their guide to the service - it addresses getting driving distances/times between a set of points. Their terms of service don't appear to require that you display a map, but take a look and see if that meets your needs.

Zip Code proximity calculation in PHP

You should download Popular Data's ZIP code database.

With this, you can use the following to calculate distance.

function calc_distance($point1, $point2)
{
    $radius      = 3958;      // Earth's radius (miles)
    $deg_per_rad = 57.29578;  // Number of degrees/radian (for conversion)

    $distance = ($radius * pi() * sqrt(
                ($point1['lat'] - $point2['lat'])
                * ($point1['lat'] - $point2['lat'])
                + cos($point1['lat'] / $deg_per_rad)  // Convert these to
                * cos($point2['lat'] / $deg_per_rad)  // radians for cos()
                * ($point1['long'] - $point2['long'])
                * ($point1['long'] - $point2['long'])
        ) / 180);

    return $distance;  // Returned using the units used for $radius.
}

Above was stolen from Adam Bellaire's answer in Calculating distance between zip codes in PHP. After doing this calculation, you can simply sort the results.

Calculate Distance Between Two Postcodes In PHP

If you take a look at the result from google you will notice that it is calculating a route from india to russia.

"destination_addresses" : [ "Wologda, Oblast Wologda, Russland, 160017" ],
"origin_addresses" : [ "Punjab 144216, Indien" ],

This happens because you only provided postal codes, without reference from which country they are. I assume you want to calculate a route within india, since your profile shows that you are from there.

If you just add ,india to your postal codes, like this:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/json?origins=144216,india&destinations=160017,india&mode=driving&language=en-EN&sensor=false

You get a result that looks much more like what you want:

{
   "destination_addresses" : [ "Chandigarh, 160017, India" ],
   "origin_addresses" : [ "Punjab 144216, India" ],
   "rows" : [
      {
         "elements" : [
            {
               "distance" : {
                  "text" : "201 km",
                  "value" : 200693
               },
               "duration" : {
                  "text" : "3 hours 30 mins",
                  "value" : 12625
               },
               "status" : "OK"
            }
         ]
      }
   ],
   "status" : "OK"
}

Fastest way (and most optimized) to calculate and sort users by ascending order of zip code distance

As I'm not overly familiar with PHP or MySQL, I can only give some basic tips but they should help. This also assumes you have no direct way of interfacing with the zip library from MySQL.

First, as it's doubtful that you have 10k zip codes in a city, take your existing query and do something like

SELECT DISTINCT ZipCode FROM Users WHERE ...

This will probably return a few dozen zip codes max, and no duplicates. Run this through your zip code library. That library itself is probably a source of slowness, as it has to look up the zip codes, and do a bunch of fancy trig to get actual distance. Take the results of this, and insert it into a temp table with just the zip code and the distance.

Once done with that list, have another query that gets the rest of the user data you want, and JOIN into the the temp table on zip code to get your distance.

This should give you quite a large speedup. You can do whatever paging you need in the second query after the results have been calculated. And no more looping through 10k rows.

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