How to calculate distance from lat/long in php?

Question

What I am trying to do is I have entries in the database which have a lat/long stored with them. I want to calculate the distance between users lat/long and entries lat/long

Answer 1

For those trying to stay away from Google (and others) APIs, I've been using this one for a while.

Because the earth is round, it will have some weird results for large scale radius submissions. It will work fine for locations within ~500 miles of each other.

/**
 * The max Latitude and Longitude coordinates within a specified milage radius.
 * 
 * @param int $miles
 * @param float $longitude
 * @param float $latitude
 *
 * @return array
 */
public function getMaxCoordinates($miles = 50, $longitude, $latitude) {
    $oneDegree = 69; // 69 Miles = 1 degree

    // Calculate the minimum/maximum possible coordinates.
    $lng_min = $longitude - $miles / abs(cos(deg2rad($latitude)) * $oneDegree);
    $lng_max = $longitude + $miles / abs(cos(deg2rad($latitude)) * $oneDegree);
    $lat_min = $latitude  - ($miles / $oneDegree);
    $lat_max = $latitude  + ($miles / $oneDegree);

    return ([
        'lat_max' => $lat_max,
        'lat_min' => $lat_min,
        'lng_max' => $lng_max,
        'lng_min' => $lng_min,
        'miles'   => $miles,
    ]);
}