Taking information from a function

Question

I want to save the geographical coordinates of an address in the database. I can do this, but there is a.

I have a function that takes an address and returns the geographical coordinates of it. The problem is that as the function has an "echo" to display the coordinates and it is locking my application. Do you know how to make this function return the result without being through "echo" or do you know how to make the application not "stop" when going through "echo"?

Follows the function:

function getCoordinates($address){

    $address = str_replace(" ", "+", $address); // replace all the white space with "+" sign to match with google search pattern

    $url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=false&address=$address";

    $response = file_get_contents($url);

    $json = json_decode($response,TRUE); //generate array object from the response from the web

    return ($json['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lat'].",".$json['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lng']);

    }

    echo getCoordinates($address);

Answer 1

If this is file called multiple times, leaves only this function in the file and echo in the other files if it is not possible, turn on the output buffer to avoid the error of aready headers sent with ob_start();

ob_start();
echo getCoordinates($address);

Answer 2

If you just want to thresh your code to know what your function is returning, use the following command:

echo '<pre>';
var_dump(getCoordinates($address));
echo '</pre>';

reference