Geonames get latitude and longitude

Question

I have been coding around with Google Geocoding until I found out that the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map. That is inconvenient because I don't need to display a map. So I switched to Geonames which is awesome!

I get the latitude and longitude of an address and add them to my database.

The code below is Jquery for a text input where users add their city/town and an auto-complete appears presuming the city they are typing. It works great but I also want to add the latitude and longitude of their city in 2 hidden form fields for sending to the database.

How is it possible to retrieve those coordinates from Geonames?

$(function() {
        function log( message ) {
            $( "<div/>" ).text( message ).prependTo( "#log" );
            $( "#log" ).attr( "scrollTop", 0 );
        }

        $( "#city" ).autocomplete({
            source: function( request, response ) {
                $.ajax({
                    url: "http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON",
                    dataType: "jsonp",
                    data: {
                        featureClass: "P",
                        style: "full",
                        maxRows: 12,
                        name_startsWith: request.term
                    },
                    success: function( data ) {
                        response( $.map( data.geonames, function( item ) {
                            return {
                                label: item.name + (item.adminName1 ? ", " + item.adminName1 : "") + ", " + item.countryName,
                                value: item.name
                            }
                        }));
                    }
                });
            },
            minLength: 2,
            select: function( event, ui ) {
                log( ui.item ?
                    "Selected: " + ui.item.label :
                    "Nothing selected, input was " + this.value);
            },
            open: function() {
                $( this ).removeClass( "ui-corner-all" ).addClass( "ui-corner-top" );
            },
            close: function() {
                $( this ).removeClass( "ui-corner-top" ).addClass( "ui-corner-all" );
            }
        });
    });

Answer 1

The lat & lng are being returned; see this test request:

http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?style=full&maxRows=12&name_startsWith=romse&username=demo

It is in the structure below so you just need to access it:

{ "geonames" : [ { 
"adminCode1" : "ENG",
<SNIP>
        "geonameId" : 2639189,
        "lat" : 50.989057046475203,
        "lng" : -1.4998912811279297