Posted: January 24 2003 at 21:09 | IP Logged

Tony,

You da man!!

Im in Florida and it is pretty darn cold here.  Supposed to get down to 23 tonight.  Im going to have to move further south .

Dave.

Posted: January 25 2003 at 09:27 | IP Logged

Dave,

I remember being a kid in Florida (back in '75), it getting "cold", and walking around with socks on my hands for gloves! It wasn't even cold (it was only about 40)!

Tony

Posted: April 04 2003 at 08:40 | IP Logged

They've changed the page again!

Looking through the HTML...

Posted: April 05 2003 at 07:56 | IP Logged

I've updated my macro, but, it does not work! Duplicating the macro in VB does, though.

Maybe this is another variable problem in PH?

The only change is...

"<td>Temperature</td>" was changed to...

"<td width="100%">Temperature</td>"

...so, my search string is now ">Temperature</td>"

Posted: April 05 2003 at 12:56 | IP Logged

Tony,

Great detective work!!  You hit the nail on the head also.  The reason it doesnt work with the macro is that same problem with the pos function flaking out with start values in the 34000 range.  You definately need your fix, but also a small change on line 10.  The corrected line 10 is:

mid(ph_geturl("http://www.weatherunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=32707"),20000,30000)

You can see that I changed the left to a mid and started at 20000 and grabbed 30000 characters.  This grabs the same set of data as before and just throws away the first 20000 characters of junk.  This will reset all the positions down 20000 and puts us in the 14000 range as the start position which works just fine now.  

For anyone else interested, Im posting below the new GetWeather macro with Tony's fix as well as my fix for the POS problem:

insert into macroheader values ('GET WEATHER','GET WEATHER',4,4,252,96,0,0,0,12632256,0,1,1,'MACROS');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',1,15,'[LOCAL1]',NULL,'mid(ph_geturl("http://www.weatherunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=32707"),20000,30000)');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',2,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"<b>",pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),">Temperature</td>")) + 3');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',3,15,'[LOCAL3]',NULL,'mid(ph_getvar_s(1,1),ph_getvar_n(1,2),3)');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',4,15,'[LOCAL4]',NULL,'"The temperature is " + if(isnumber(ph_getvar_s(1,3)),ph_getvar_s(1,3),left(ph_getvar_s(1,3),2)) + " degrees. "');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',5,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"<b>",pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"<td>Humidity</td>",ph_getvar_n(1,2))) + 3');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',6,15,'[LOCAL3]',NULL,'mid(ph_getvar_s(1,1),ph_getvar_n(1,2),3)');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',7,15,'[LOCAL4]',NULL,'ph_getvar_s(1,4) + "The humidity is " + if(isnumber(ph_getvar_s(1,3)),ph_getvar_s(1,3),left(ph_getvar_s(1,3),2)) + " percent. "');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',8,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"<b>Forecast for ")');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',9,15,'[LOCAL1]',NULL,'mid(ph_getvar_s(1,1),ph_getvar_n(1,2))');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',10,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"<td align=left><b>") + 18');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',11,15,'[LOCAL3]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"</b>",ph_getvar_n(1,2))');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',12,15,'[LOCAL4]',NULL,'ph_getvar_s(1,4) + "The forecast for " + mid(ph_getvar_s(1,1),ph_getvar_n(1,2),ph_getvar_n(1,3) - ph_getvar_n(1,2)) + " is "');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',13,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'ph_getvar_n(1,3) + 9');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',14,15,'[LOCAL3]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,1),"</td>",ph_getvar_n(1,2))');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',15,15,'[LOCAL4]',NULL,'ph_getvar_s(1,4) + mid(ph_getvar_s(1,1),ph_getvar_n(1,2),ph_getvar_n(1,3) - ph_getvar_n(1,2))');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',16,15,'[LOCAL2]',NULL,'pos(ph_getvar_s(1,4),"winds")');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',17,16,'',NULL,'if(ph_getvar_n(1,2) = 0,3,1)');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',18,15,'[LOCAL4]',NULL,'replace(ph_getvar_s(1,4),ph_getvar_n(1,2),5,"wins")');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',19,16,'',NULL,'- 3');
insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',20,9,'',NULL,'ph_getvar_s(1,4)');

Great job Tony!

Dave.

Posted: August 11 2003 at 21:52 | IP Logged

Yet again, the code bloats!

Change:

mid( ph_geturl( "www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=YOURZIP"), 20000, 30000)

To:

mid( ph_geturl( "www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=YOURZIP"), 30000, 30000)

Posted: August 12 2003 at 07:08 | IP Logged

It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger....

Posted: July 21 2004 at 11:31 | IP Logged

Tony,

Great minds think alike!!  Ive used their WAP page to get the temperature for my HVAC routines for about a month now.  Much smaller and easier to work with.

It would be great if you came up with a macro that you could post here.  Maybe something generic that takes the zipcode as a parameter so people could just call it with ph_macroparm such as: ph_macroparm("GET WEATHER",32707,0,0,0,0)

Also, Ive come up with a solution for the problem with this line:

insert into macrodetail values ('GET WEATHER',1,15,'[LOCAL1]',NULL,'mid(ph_geturl("http://www.weatherunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=32707"),20000,30000)');

The problem has been that the "pos" function fails when dealing with positions greater than approx 32000 so we've had to try to snapshot the area were interested in with the "mid" function.  The problem is, weatherunderground keeps changing their page and this "interesting area" keeps moving around.  The solution is to use the "posw" function.  This function works just like the "pos" function but has no problems working with positions greater than 32000.  Using this function, we don't need to worry with the "mid" function.

Good luck,

Dave.

Posted: July 22 2004 at 09:44 | IP Logged

Its in the current version...just slipped through the documentation .

Dave.

Posted: July 22 2004 at 13:14 | IP Logged

Not exactly on topic - I don't use any weather pages at home, but I do scrape data for a mobile phone applet that I've written. I find the NOAA weather pages the easiest to work with - you can get them in plain text - nice small, predictable formatting. I haven't seen a change in the format in the year I've been using them.

If weather underground changes again, you might consider one of these.

For long forcasts I use NOAA Forcasts (Seattle):
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Seattle/afd?SEASFTSEW

For detailed forcasts, NOAA zone (also Seattle / NWS):
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Seattle/afd?SEAZFPSEW

For current conditions I use METAR data - this is used by airports (Again, Seattle - Boeing Field):
Raw: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/wrhq/GetMetar.cgi?SEA+Metar
Translated: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/wrhq/GetMetar.cgi?SEA+Public