RE: Christmas Wish Lists

["Norman Vine" <nhv@cape.com>]

 John C. Peterson writes:

>On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 03:08:51PM -0800, Jerome Kaidor wrote:
>> > 
>> >    With the holidays coming up, I thought it might be fun 
>for people to
>> > post thier Christmas "wish lists". No, I don't mean that 
>new GPS unit or
>> > whatever, I mean in terms of aviation software for Linux. 
>[...snip...]
>> > 
>> *** How about a standardized API for doing DUATS-type stuff, 
>e.g., getting
>> weather reports and filing flight plans?  I've seen at least 
>one TCL script
>> for doing this, but DUATS alas changes their format 
>occasionally - such 
>> scripts are always out of date.  Also, there are at least 
>two different
>> DUATS services.
>> 
>
>I've played some with the aviation weather observations and forecasts
>that NOAA/NWS provides over the web, and found them to be fairly easy
>to work with.  I've already written some crude shell scripts that I
>run regularly out of my crontab. They fetch pages with "lynx -dump",
>and then extract the desired data with "gawk".  Writing "robot
>software" to interface with DUATS will be a bit trickier since
>cookies are being used to identify who you are. (And no passwd
>security I might add, Jeez!)
>
>   Any other Xmas wishes??? Only 9 days until Santa comes :^)
>

attached find a simple python script that will get 
weather reports

I am sure we could easily interface with DUATS also
as python has a simple to use 'cookie' interface.

Cheers

Norman
#! /usr/bin/env python
"""
get_metar.py -- get verbose metar station report
   i.e. for Paris-Aeroport Charles De Gaulle, France (LFPG)
   python get_metar.py LFPG
   or
   python get_metar.py -d LFPG
   to see trace messages of what is happening
"""

import sys
debugging = 0

####
def get_metar(metar_id, callback=sys.stdout.write):
	from ftplib import FTP
	ftp = FTP('weather.noaa.gov')
	ftp.set_debuglevel(debugging)
	ftp.login()
	ftp.cwd('/data/observations/metar/decoded')
	ftp.retrbinary('RETR ' + metar_id + '.TXT', callback)
	ftp.quit()

####
# test program starts here
if __name__ == '__main__':

	while sys.argv[1] == '-d':
		debugging = debugging+1
		del sys.argv[1]

	get_metar(sys.argv[1])