iPhone Yahoo Weather API

[coulls]

Hi all,

Does anyone know of an easy way to convert where a phone is, to a Yahoo! weather location?

Example: I am in Toronto, Canada
Yahoo! expects: CAXX0504

Does anyone know how the iPhone weather app does this?

Cheers,

Jase

[Dutch]

This may or may not help you, since I am using weather.com API, but I use GeoNames.org to pass a latitude / longitude and retrieve a zip code. Perhaps you can use iPhone's Built-in GPS to get the lat/long, retrieve the zipCode from GeoNames, and covert the zipCode to the Yahoo Location ID? Seems like Yahoo would provide some sort of API for Zip->Location ID.

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=34.005561&lng=-117.903403

Returns, in XML format the surrounding zipCodes and their distances from the lat/long you entered....

<geonames>
−
<code>
<postalcode>91744</postalcode>
<name>La Puente</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>34.005561</lat>
<lng>-117.903403</lng>
<adminCode1>CA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>California</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Los Angeles</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
<distance>0.0</distance>
</code>
−
<code>
<postalcode>91792</postalcode>
<name>West Covina</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>34.022852</lat>
<lng>-117.897459</lng>
<adminCode1>CA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>California</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Los Angeles</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
<distance>1.9991062304489233</distance>
</code>
−
<code>
<postalcode>91748</postalcode>
<name>Rowland Heights</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>33.981777</lat>
<lng>-117.896946</lng>
<adminCode1>CA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>California</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Los Angeles</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
<distance>2.710697351269323</distance>
</code>
−
<code>
<postalcode>91745</postalcode>
<name>Hacienda Heights</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>33.997741</lat>
<lng>-117.965205</lng>
<adminCode1>CA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>California</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Los Angeles</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
<distance>5.762792207138951</distance>
</code>
−
<code>
<postalcode>91791</postalcode>
<name>West Covina</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>34.065267</lat>
<lng>-117.897767</lng>
<adminCode1>CA</adminCode1>
<adminName1>California</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Los Angeles</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
<distance>6.658965500043338</distance>
</code>
</geonames>

[coulls]

Originally Posted by Dutch

This may or may not help you, since I am using weather.com API, but I use GeoNames.org to pass a latitude / longitude and retrieve a zip code. Perhaps you can use this to covert the zipCode to the Yahoo Location ID?

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=34.005561&lng=-117.903403

Returns, in XML format the surrounding zipCodes and their distances from the lat/long you entered....

Thanks. I just quickly tried it with my non-US location (http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPos...3.6&lng=-79.41) and it gave me what you'd expect in the form of postcodes, so it may be of use for the future.

Jase

[Dutch]

Originally Posted by coulls

Thanks. I just quickly tried it with my non-US location (http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPos...3.6&lng=-79.41) and it gave me what you'd expect in the form of postcodes, so it may be of use for the future.

Jase

Yahoo must provide some Zip->Location API - no?

[meenupreet1]

Any ideas for implementing weather API on a iphone application

[ZunePod]

Sorry for bringing this up again, and reviving the thread, but it isn't really answered.

I'd like to know what Distance is defined in (miles, km, etc). Also would I be able to use a different kind of weather service, like Google.

And finally, the guy who said that Yahoo! wants CAXX0504 for Toronto, Canada. Well what does 'XX' and the number come from, CA is obviously for Canada.

Because if there is no easy way to do this, I'll have to manually type in every city into a PLIST and I only wish to make this a small but useful part of my app.

Thanks for reading my post.


EDIT: I've been doing a bit of digging, and all you need is an AppID, which you have to register for, and the WOEID of the place you want the weather for, which is the first 4/5 digits of the return of this: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places...K')?appid=[yourappid]

So all I need now is to know how to only get the digits from this reading, then send it to the next part: feed://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=28218&u=c

Oh and I need another thing, to be able to convert lat/long into a place name.

EDIT 2: Done some more digging (yay me) and I found something in the thread that I just missed completely, the Geonames thing is extremely useful, and the only thing I face now, is getting the weather and putting it into a nice GUI, GO ME!!!

[ZunePod]

I postponed the project I mentioned above, but I decided to give it another go today.

Done a lot of messing around and now I have a tempate that almost works in terms of what I wanna do.

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places...e%27%29?appid=[appid]

That returns this:

<places yahoo:start="0" yahoo:count="1" yahoo:total="1">
−
<place yahoo:uri="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/28717584" xml:lang="en-us">
<woeid>28717584</woeid>
<placeTypeName code="20">Point of Interest</placeTypeName>
<name>Sydney Opera House</name>
<country type="Country" code="AU">Australia</country>
<admin1 type="State" code="AU-NSW">New South Wales</admin1>
<admin2/>
<admin3/>
<locality1 type="Town">Sydney</locality1>
<locality2/>
<postal type="Postal Code">2000</postal>
−
<centroid>
<latitude>-33.857639</latitude>
<longitude>151.214706</longitude>
</centroid>
−
<boundingBox>
−
<southWest>
<latitude>-33.859119</latitude>
<longitude>151.213577</longitude>
</southWest>
−
<northEast>
<latitude>-33.856159</latitude>
<longitude>151.215836</longitude>
</northEast>
</boundingBox>
</place>
</places>

The WOEID string is the one I want, how can I use NSXMLParser or libXML to get just that string?