One of the coolest free services of Google is the Google Code with lots of free APIs to play with. Recently, I was working on a web project which requires me to plot some points of LatLong (Latitude and Longitude, GPS) on Google Map and as the Google Maps API provided, it only accepts GPS or LatLong coordinates in a decimal format like 10.741658, 119.338733.

When I attended the Google DevFest Manila last July 6, 2010, I asked the speaker during the Q&A portion about the LatLong issue I have because the available GPS data we have is on a degree format like 10° 44′ 29.97″ N, 119° 20′ 19.44″ E. I asked if Google Maps API only accepts decimal format for LatLong (GPS) and he replied YES. So I followed up and asked if the API has this built-in function that converts it to degree format GPS to decimal format GPS. Like for instance, we have this 10° 44′ 29.97″ N, 119° 20′ 19.44″ E to 10.741658, 119.338733. The speaker said the API does not support it yet and suggested to get some third party function to do the conversion.