Retrieve coordinates while providing address

I've looked everywhere, (well almost), for a PHP or shortcode function that uses geolocation to return the lat and lng coordinates when given an address. Does Meta Box Geolocation provide a function? I'm not concerned with displaying the results , just getting the values themselves. I'll put the function in my child-theme functions.php file. I thought I could use a autocomplete custom item to store lat and lng fields for my posts that have the custom fields, and have tried to follow the instructions in the documentation, but I can't get that approach to work.