Thursday 18 August 2016

Deep-diving into the Google pb= embedded map format

Building off the excellent work of Andrew Whitby, I wanted to go further in understanding this unusual format. Specifically because when trying to parse the lat-long of the marker out of it, the least couple of significant digits were always "off", and frustratingly, by a seemingly-random amount.

Let's take a look at a Google "Embed map" URL for a random lat-long. You can obtain one of these by clicking a random point on a Google Map, then clicking the lat-long hyperlink on the popup that appears at the bottom of the page. From there the map sidebar swings out; choose Share -> Embed map - that's your URL.
"https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=
!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3152.8774048836685
!2d145.01352231578036
!3d-37.792912740624445!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768
!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0%3A0x0!2zMzfCsDQ3JzM0LjUiUyAxNDXCsDAwJzU2LjYiRQ
!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sau!4v1471218824160"
Well, it's not pretty, but with the help of Andrew Whitby's cheat sheet and the comments from others, it turns out we can actually render it as a nested structure knowing that the format [id]m[n] means a structure (multi-field perhaps?) with n children in total - my IDE helped a lot here with indentation:
"https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=" +
    "!1m18" +
        "!1m12" +
            "!1m3" +
                "!1d3152.8774048836685" +
                "!2d145.01352231578036" +
                "!3d-37.792912740624445" +
            "!2m3" +
                "!1f0" +
                "!2f0" +
                "!3f0" +
            "!3m2" +
                "!1i1024" +
                "!2i768" +
            "!4f13.1" +
        "!3m3" +
            "!1m2" +
                "!1s0x0%3A0x0" +
                "!2zMzfCsDQ3JzM0LjUiUyAxNDXCsDAwJzU2LjYiRQ" +
        "!5e0" +
    "!3m2" +
        "!1sen" +
        "!2sau" +
    "!4v1471218824160"
It all (kinda) makes sense! You can see how a decoder could quite easily be able to count ! characters to decide that a bang-group (or could we call it an m-group?) has finished. I'm going to take a stab and say the e represents an enumerated type too - given that !5e0 is "roadmap" (default) mode and !5e1 forces "satellite" mode.

So this is all very well but it doesn't explain why URLs that I generate using the standard method don't actually put the lat-long I selected into the URL - yet they render perfectly! What do I mean? Well, the lat-long that I clicked on (i.e. the marker) for this example is actually:
               -37.792916,  145.015722
And yet in the URL it appears (kinda) as:
               -37.792912,  145.013522
Which is enough to be slightly, visibly, annoyingly, wrong if you're trying to use it as-is by parsing the URL. What I thought I needed to understand now was this section of the URL:

                "!1d3152.8774048836685" +
                "!2d145.01352231578036" +
                "!3d-37.792912740624445" +

Being the "scale" and centre points of the map. Then I realised - it's quite subtle, but for (one presumes) aesthetic appeal, Google doesn't put the map marker in the dead-centre of the map. So these co-ordinates are just the map centre. The marker itself is defined elsewhere. And there's only one place left. The mysterious z field:
   !2zMzfCsDQ3JzM0LjUiUyAxNDXCsDAwJzU2LjYiRQ
Sure enough, substituting the z-field from Mr. Whitby's example completely relocates the map to put the marker in the middle of Iowa. So now; how to decode this? Well, on a hunch I tried base64decode-ing it, and bingo:
% echo MzfCsDQ3JzM0LjUiUyAxNDXCsDAwJzU2LjYiRQ | base64 --decode
37°47'34.5"S 145°00'56.6"E
So there we have it. I can finally parse out the lat-long of the marker when given an embed URL. Hope it helps someone else out there...

3 comments:

  1. Something is broken - marker no longer appears without "!1s0x0%3A0x0" this part - this has something with hexadecimal notation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,
    Your blog was most helpful. Don't know if you still review comments, but if you could explain the "scale" part of the map zoom/centre matrix, that would be very helpful. I am trying to convert a Google "zoom" level to the scale that is generated, but the scaling factor algorithm I am reading about doesn't seem to match at all.
    Thanks,
    Jarrod

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