How to get E6 format of Longitude Latitude for Google Maps on Android

Question

how do i find out the SPECIFIC E6 values of longitude latitude of a location. For example, i googled for long-lat of Asuncion, the capital city of Paraguay. It returns me:

The latitude and longitude of Asuncion, Paraguay is 25°16' S, 57°40 W

Now how do i convert THIS format of long-lat into E6 format of long-lat which android understands? What exactly IS THIS E6 thing?

[ps i also googled for E6 long-lat of Asuncion....... with no luck]

Answer 1

So it's a two step process - thanks to hooked82 's answer

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step 1. Conversion from DMS to Decimal Degrees From Wikipedia

Given a DMS (Degrees, Minutes, Seconds) coordinate such as 87°43′41″ W , it's trivial to convert it to a number of decimal degrees using the following methods:

Total number of degrees
= 87

Total number of seconds
= 43′41″ = (43*60 + 41*1) = 2621 seconds.

The fractional part is total number of seconds divided by 3600
= 2621 / 3600 = 0.728056

Add fractional degrees to the whole degrees to produce the final result
= 87 + 0.728056 = 87.728056.

Since it is a West longitude coordinate, negate the result.
= -87.728056.

Long-Lat reference:

Lat.  North = +
Lat.  South = -
Long. East  = +
Long. West  = -

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step 2. Conversion from Decimal Degrees to MicroDegrees (the E6 format) From SO discussion

MicroDegrees (the E6 format) = DecimalDegrees * 1e6
--- as mentioned in AndroidDevGuide as well

thus,

float lat   = -23.4456f;   //in DecimalDegrees
float lng   = 45.44334f;   //in DecimalDegrees
GeoPoint gp = new GeoPoint((int)(lat * 1E6), (int)(lng * 1E6));

Answer 2

I'm not sure of a programmatic approach to converting a DMS Coordinate to Microdegrees, but there is a manual conversion process which I came across at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversion#Conversion_from_DMS_to_Decimal_Degree

Also, take a look at this SO question:

Android GeoPoint with lat/long values

If you're manually trying to get GPS coordinates and want values that Android can handle, you can always go to Google Maps and Right-Click on a point on the map and select "What's Here". It will give you the lat/long of that position, though there are many ways of getting these.