Getting the Weather - Perl

Earlier, I talked about creating a script that would retrieve the weather. However, the script was left unfinished. That was fine then, since I only wanted to explain how to form a POST request, but let's wrap up by re-examining the weather example in order to create something functional. 

The first thing we should do is rewrite the script so that it uses one of the shortcut methods of LWP::UserAgent that we just examined. Since we need to make a POST request, we'll use the post method. 

We'll need to pass in form data, though, and thankfully, the post method makes this really easy. All we have to do is pass a reference to a dictionary of key/value pairs for the form. This will be passed as the second argument to the method. 

Here's what that looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perluse strict;use LWP::UserAgent;# Create the user agentmy $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;# Post the form datamy $res = $ua->post('http://forecast.weather.gov/zipcity.php',

 {'inputstring' => 'Washington,DC'});

Again, the post method returns a response object. You might think that we should now examine the content of the response object to search for whatever information we need. However, it turns out that the server returns a 302 status code, indicating that the information we want is found elsewhere. The National Weather Service Web site actually finds a geographical point that matches the input string, and then redirects us to the proper page for that point. 

In order to actually view the weather, then, we need to redirect to the proper location. This location is stored in the response headers in a field called “Location” and can be easily extracted using the header method. Here's how we extract the new URL:

# Extract the new locationmy $location = $res->header('Location');

Now we just need to request the new page. After we get the content, we can use regular expressions to extract the current temperature Here's the final few lines of the script:

# Redirect to the new location$res = $ua->get($location);# Get the weatherif ($res->content =~ />(.*?)<br><br>(d+) &d/){ print "$1n$2n";}

Of course, there is a lot more to LWP, but it contains far too much functionality to be summarized in a single article. This article, however, has covered the very basics, and you should now be able to create simple applications that can access the Web.