PHP How to hit a url and download its xml - php

Question

I am trying to send this query:
http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo&country=US&style=full&adminCode1=AK
To a web service and pull down and parse a bunch of fields there, namely these:
// 1) totalResultsCount
// 2) name
// 3) lat
// 4) lng
// 5) countryCode
// 6) countryName
// 7) adminName1 - gives full state name
// 8) adminName2 - owner of the park.
I am doing this:
$query_string = "http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo&country=US&style=full&adminCode1=AK";
Could someone please provide the right code to loop through the results and get values?

Answer 1

Since the response is XML, you can use SimpleXML:
$url = "http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo&country=US&style=full&adminCode1=AK";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($url, null, true);
echo "totalResultsCount: " . $xml->totalResultsCount . "<br />";
foreach($xml->geoname as $geoname) {
echo $geoname->toponymName . "<br />";
echo $geoname->lat . "<br />";
echo $geoname->countryCode . "<br />";
echo $geoname->countryName . "<br />";
echo $geoname->adminName1 . "<br />";
echo $geoname->adminName2 . "<br />";
}
Which will displays the results as follows:
totalResultsCount: 225
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
58.50056
US
United States
Alaska
US.AK.232
...

Answer 2

Firstly, looks like that web service is returning XML rather than JSON. You can use SimpleXML to parse that out.
Secondly, you may want to check out curl
An Example:
$ch = curl_init("http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo&country=US&style=full&adminCode1=AK");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Answer 3

fopen will give you a resource, no the file. Since you're doing a json decode, you'll want to just the whole thing as a string. Easiest way to do this is file_get_contents.
$query = 'http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PRK&maxRows=10&username=demo&country=US&style=full&adminCode1=AK';
$response = file_get_contents($query);
// You really should do error handling on the response here.
$decoded = json_decode($response, true);
echo '<p>Decoded: '.$decoded['lat'].'</p>';