Sorry for the delay, the weekend happened.
Have you had a chance to look at PHP’s CURL, and XML fiunctions? Still think PHP would be the easier?
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php
http://php.net/manual/en/book.simplexml.php
http://php.net/manual/en/book.xmlreader.php
http://php.net/manual/en/book.xml.php
If XML looks too daunting maybe JSON instead?
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.json.php
Also I’m not sure about
Do you know what those are in what the API returns?
I don’t see them explicitly so I’m guessing one or more of the numeric vales in combination represent the status.