Bing Maps throwing "Invalid Geocode" error on street intersection that it is able to get the Latitudes and Longitude from - bing-maps

Question

I am currently working on a project that involves calculating Duration matrices from a collection of thousands of addresses using NEO4J and Bing Maps API. Since the data is sensitive, we're going to use the mock address (which actually produces the same issue I'm describing) '72ND & DODGE, OMAHA, NE 68132' to represent the format intersection addresses are being sent to Bing Maps API using their keys and basic url requests.
To preface this: the issue isn't with my code (which is also sensitive data), as all my code is doing is sending one url string of the above format plus the authorization key to Bing Maps and awaiting a response that contains the duration data of the trip. My issue is Bing Maps being seemingly unable to handle or work with intersections of streets to calculate distances/durations from other locations. When I throw these addresses into Bing/Google Maps in the web browser, they are able to be found and calculated in the exact same format as the above example.
I start off my program checking if an address exists/is valid by having it find the latitude and longitude of each address, so for the example '72ND & DODGE, OMAHA, NE 68132' it found: Lat: '41.259690' and Long: '-96.023770'. If it is unable to find the Lat/Long of an addresses, then it throws the 'Invalid Geocode' error, but in this initialization context it means the address does not exist, or is poorly formatted, which makes sense and is why I did this for the initialization phase.
However, if I go to use '72ND & DODGE, OMAHA, NE 68132' for any duration calculations between other addresses, it throws the 'Invalid Geocode' for '72ND & DODGE, OMAHA, NE 68132' over and over again with no explanation on why even though it passed the Lat/Long check. I'd also like to mention that this issue isn't consistent, as some intersections do not work while others do, but there is no consistency in knowing which ones will or will not work. Thus, I am ultimately wondering if Bing Maps is unable to calculate certain addresses no matter their formatting or whatnot.

Answer 1

Be sure to encode your query before putting it into the URL. Especially when you have & in your query since it would then break your query up, thinking you were asking just for 72ND and the rest of your query is query string parameter name. This is documented in the best practices section here.
In Java you can encode the query parameter like this:
String baseURL = "https://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?key={BingMapsKey}&query=";
// query string
String query = "72ND & DODGE, OMAHA, NE 68132";
// URL encode query string
String encodeStr = URLEncoder.encode(query, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name());
// final url
String url = baseURL + encodeStr;
Here is an example of how your query URL should look:
https://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?key={BingMapsKey}&query= 72ND%20%26%20DODGE%2C%20OMAHA%2C%20NE%2068132