That's a handy little script to have, and learn from.  Geonames.org also 
hosts web services for finding the elevation, nearby populated places, 
nearby Wikipedia entries, some reverse geocoding, and a few more. 
(http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html)   Thanks for posting 
the script!

- John



Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> 2008/9/25 John Callahan <john.callahan@udel.edu>:
>   
>> If there's not a function within R for this, maybe there's a way to use the
>> web services from Geonames.org and parse the results.  Maybe this could be
>> done within R, or in a separate script called by R.  I haven't used R enough
>> to know if this is possible.
>>
>> http://ws.geonames.org/timezone?lat=47.01&lng=10.2&style=full
>>     
>
>   Oh well, in that case it is trivial...
>
> getTZ <- function(lat,long){
>   url=paste("http://ws.geonames.org/timezone?lat=",lat,"&lng=",long,"&style=full",sep="")
>   u=url(url,open="r")
>   text=readLines(u)
>   tz = text[grep("timezoneId",text)]
>   tz = sub("<timezoneId>","",tz)
>   tz = sub("</timezoneId>","",tz)
>   return(tz)
> }
>
>  note how I avoid parsing XML....
>
> Barry
>   

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


