Here’s how you set Google “locale”:

location = {:address => '1711 Martin Luther King Junior Wy', :city => 'Berkeley', :state => 'CA'}

geocoder = GeoX::Geocoder.new(:geoengine => GeoX::Google, :locale => 'oe=utf8')
locations = geocoder.geocode(location)

When you create your geocoder, you set this value. It will persist for all subsequent geocodings using that *instance* of the Geocoder.

One small problem I noticed is that you’re not including the option to request UTF-8 from the Google geocode service. This messes up quite a few things in an application I’m working on because place names with accent marks get truncated after the first accented character.

To fix this, simply modify google.rb on line 38:

Before:

url << “output=xml”

After:

url << “output=xml&oe=utf-8″

With that caveat you could pre-process your incoming addresses with something like:

http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/area.html

This is just an example - google “area codes region lookup” or variations to find tons more info.

I’d recommend wrapping GeoX in a pre-processing class that handles conversion from phone numbers to geography where possible. Basically a geocoder should get geographic information, and you should pre-process phone numbers to generate required geographic information which you submit to the big geocoder engines for conversion to lat/long. Hope that helps!

Also, you can now locate your geox_api_keys.rb file in the Rails root/config folder so you can have an SVN:external link to my code base and stay current more easily.

A couple suggestions.

1. Instead of using an API key file in the plug-in directory, copy the file to the config directory. That way you can use an svn:external link to the plugin.

2. Allow for easy switching of api keys based on environment.