Get coordinates from address

In Codeigniter 3 I made a helper (which I basically copied from the internet):

PHP Code:

<?php
function geocode($address){
    $address = urlencode($address);

    $url = "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/?addressdetails=1&q=$address&format=json&limit=1";

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36");

    $result = curl_exec($ch);

    curl_close($ch);

    return json_decode($result, true);
} 


Then I call it from a Controller:

PHP Code:

function testMe(){
    $this->load->helper('address');
    echo "<pre>";
    print_r(geocode("piazza della signoria  ,5, firenze"));
    } 


It is using CURL, so it may not be what you want, but it works for me.

It works fine thank's.