How to map google Geocoding API results to simple City, Region, Country - json

Question

I have some markers on a map and when the user click them I use the google geocoder to get the address information. The issue is the format that Google returns this data. I want to display the address in a consistent format such as
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Seattle, Washington, United States
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
does any one know a simple way to parse this data so I end up with some nice simple json like
{"city":"Vancouver", "region":"British Columbia", "country":"Canada"}
Thanks.

Answer 1

Oh man, the days when I thought political geography was this simple were sweeter days. If Google could return data like this, they surely would. Instead you get a mess of locality, sublocality, administrative_area_level_*, country, etc.
To illustrate this, consider the following:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=11215&sensor=false
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=10010&sensor=false
For Manhattan, you're in okay shape. You get the borough (Manhattan), the city (New York), the county (New York), and the state (New York). For Brooklyn, things aren't so clean. You get the borough (Brooklyn), the county (Kings), and the state (New York).
Now if you go a little ways out onto Long Island, you get more fun:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=40.723464,%20-73.716282&sensor=false
In this case you get the village (Floral Park), the town (Hempstead), the county (Nassau), and the state (New York), but everything is kind of muddled up.
This is the variation within 20 miles in one state. If you move out of that, you can count on even less. In the UK, what most of what we'd want to see as London, will be some smaller borough of Greater London.
Google provides a deep and rich taxonomy to deal with this variation, but you will still need to apply your own rules to make sense of it (often at the state by state and country by country level)