JSON decoding from a URL

Question

I'm using an API which returns a JSON string:

http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceNameJSON?lat=51.9877644&lng=-1.47866&username=demo

The part I'm interested in is the city/town name (in this instance Hook Norton) which I'd like as a PHP variable. I understand the JSON_decode() function comes into play somewhere, but how do I access the output of the API?

Answer 1

Try this.

$json = file_get_contents('http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceNameJSON?lat=51.9877644&lng=-1.47866&username=demo');

$data = json_decode($json,true);

$Geonames = $data['geonames'][0];

echo "<pre>";

print_r($Geonames);

exit;