Parsing XML APIs

In this section, we will look at creating a simple weather forecast application using the OpenWeatherMap 5 day forecast API (http://openweathermap.org/forecast#5days), which can return an XML document containing the forecast data.

This API is accessed through a URL in the following format; in this case, we are searching for the weather in Harwell, UK:

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?q=Harwell,GB&mode=xml

This gives an output in the following format, where the time element is repeated for the number of forecasts that are available in the 5 day time range:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<weatherdata>
   <location>
      <name>Harwell</name>
      <type />
      <country>GB</country>
      <timezone />
      <location altitude="0" latitude="51.599468" longitude="-1.29175" geobase="geonames" geobaseid="0" />
   </location>
   <credit />
   <meta>
      <lastupdate />
...