Google Weather API conditions

Question

I'm using SAX to pull information from the google weather API and I'm having issues with the "conditions".

Specifically I'm using this code:

public void startElement (String uri, String name, String qName, Attributes atts) {
    if (qName.compareTo("condition") == 0) {
        String cCond = atts.getValue(0);
        System.out.println("Current Conditions: " + cCond);
        currentConditions.add(cCond);
    }

To pull XML from something like this:

http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Boston+MA

Meanwhile I'm trying to get conditions only for the current day, and not for any days in the future.

Is there some check I could put into the xml to only pull data for the present day based on what's in the XML file?

Thanks!

¿Do you have to use SAX? It's perfectly possible, but this pretty looks like an XPath job? — Víctor Romero, May 08 '12 at 16:29
Sax just seems to be the easiest way to parse this. I'm all for learning a new way though. — A_Elric, May 08 '12 at 16:55
**The Google weather API was shut down in 2012** -> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12145820/google-weather-api-gone/35943521 — John Slegers, Mar 11 '16 at 15:55

Víctor Romero · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-08T17:09:54.920

This should do the trick. Keep in mind that if your are using a framework it might have utility functions for XPath to make it simpler.

import java.io.IOException;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import javax.xml.xpath.*;

public class XPathWeather {

  public static void main(String[] args) 
   throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, 
          IOException, XPathExpressionException {

    DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = builder.parse("/tmp/weather.xml");

    XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
    XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();
    XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("/xml_api_reply/weather/current_conditions/condition/@data");

    String result = (String) expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.STRING);
    System.out.println(result); 
  }

}

Google Weather API conditions

1 Answers1