Hope this is the appropriate forum, though it is more about Maperitive - I have gotten the same issues when trying opening the file in question in JOSM to isolate the problem.
I suspect the problem here is that I’m missing something very basic, but I haven’t been able to find a solution by Googling - everything I see seems to assume that data downloaded from XAPI works fine with OSM-oriented programs like JOSM and Maperitive, and only describes how to get it working in various geodatabase formats.
I managed to use the following “url” to download data for the rivers in a section of Japan:
http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi?*[waterway=river][bbox=134.337998725683,33.8585831397029,137.340574446097,35.5293557214928]
So I’ve got the file, which can be opened in TextEdit or WordPad and is clearly an XML file containing the appropriate data.
I’d like to use it in Maperitive, but I keep getting errors. First was “Script execution error (line 1): The file type could not be recognized”. I tried adding the extensions “.xml” and “.osm” to the filename. The latter got the file type recognizable, apparently. However, I then got the following:
Script execution error (line 1): The file could not be loaded: Name
cannot begin with the ‘’ character, hexadecimal value 0xFFFD. Line 2,
position 19
Line 2 looks like this:
Position 19 is the space before “generator.”
Any ideas what’s behind this error and how to get Maperitive to accept the file?