If you need a full svg not only a path and you want it to be modifiable on client side (e.g. change text, hide details, ...) you can use an alternative data 'URL' with included svg:
var svg = '<svg width="400" height="110"><rect width="300" height="100" /></svg>';
icon.url = 'data:image/svg+xml;charset=UTF-8;base64,' + btoa(svg);
JavaScript (Firefox) btoa() is used to get the base64 encoding from the SVG text. Your may also use http://dopiaza.org/tools/datauri/index.php to generate base data URLs.
Here is a full example jsfiddle:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="map" style="width: 500px; height: 400px;"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map'), {
zoom: 10,
center: new google.maps.LatLng(-33.92, 151.25),
mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
});
var template = [
'<?xml version="1.0"?>',
'<svg width="26px" height="26px" viewBox="0 0 100 100" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">',
'<circle stroke="#222" fill="{{ color }}" cx="50" cy="50" r="35"/>',
'</svg>'
].join('\n');
var svg = template.replace('{{ color }}', '#800');
var docMarker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: new google.maps.LatLng(-33.92, 151.25),
map: map,
title: 'Dynamic SVG Marker',
icon: { url: 'data:image/svg+xml;charset=UTF-8,' + encodeURIComponent(svg), scaledSize: new google.maps.Size(20, 20) },
optimized: false
});
var docMarker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: new google.maps.LatLng(-33.95, 151.25),
map: map,
title: 'Dynamic SVG Marker',
icon: { url: 'data:image/svg+xml;charset=UTF-8;base64,' + btoa(svg), scaledSize: new google.maps.Size(20, 20) },
optimized: false
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Additional Information can be found here.
Avoid base64 encoding:
In order to avoid base64 encoding you can replace 'data:image/svg+xml;charset=UTF-8;base64,' + btoa(svg) with 'data:image/svg+xml;charset=UTF-8,' + encodeURIComponent(svg)
This should work with modern browsers down to IE9.
The advantage is that encodeURIComponent is a default js function and available in all modern browsers. You might also get smaller links but you need to test this and consider to use ' instead of " in your svg.
Also see Optimizing SVGs in data URIs for additional info.
IE support: In order to support SVG Markers in IE one needs two small adaptions as described here: SVG Markers in IE. I updated the example code to support IE.