When you punch in “weather” in google, you get a nice, clean representation of the upcoming weather. Working recently for an asian airline, I needed access to a weather API that wasn’t going to cost the earth, so I did a little digging on the google user groups, and uncovered a cool undocumented API.
It’s quite simple to grab the XML, just point your browser over here – obviously change out the GET string for your own location.
http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=wellington+new+zealand
This will spit out a nice tidy XML of the next few days’ weather.
Here’s a snippet of PHP for grabbing the weather XML:
<?
ini_set("zlib.output_compression", "Off");
header("Content-type: text/xml");
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Pragma: no-cache');
$weather = $_GET["weather"];
$url = "http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=".urlencode($weather);
$file = "_weather_".str_replace( array(","," "), "_", $weather).".xml";
ob_clean();
flush();
// check if a local file less than an hour old is already on file
if (!file_exists($file) || filemtime($file) < time() - 3600 || filesize($file) == 0){
ob_start();
readfile($url);
$google_xml = ob_get_clean();
echo $google_xml;
// save local copy of xml
$handle = fopen($file,w);
fwrite($handle, $google_xml);
fclose($handle);
}
else{
// load local copy of xml
ob_start();
readfile($file);
$google_xml = ob_get_clean();
echo $google_xml;
}
?>
