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Learning Python is the next goal that I’ve set myself, though I have put it off for a bit while I improve my maths skills.

But I do have one little Python script that I’ve been playing with for a while, which I first wrote to dip my toe in and see if I liked the language. (I do, very much so).

It’s incredibly basic but complements my automatic weather script, which saves a lot of time and tedium at work, by fetching a text summary of the weather for the entire UK.

 1#!/usr/bin/env python3
 2"""Get a 3 to 5 day outlook for the UK from the Met Office."""
 3
 4from urllib.request import urlopen
 5from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
 6from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
 7
 8api_url = ("http://datapoint.metoffice.gov.uk/public/" +
 9           "data/txt/wxfcs/regionalforecast/xml/515")
10api_key = "Your Datapoint API key here"
11
12def get_weather():
13  """Retrieve and parse the text summary forecast"""
14  raw_xml = urlopen(api_url + "?key=" + api_key)
15  outlook = bs(raw_xml).find(id="day3to5").get_text()
16  return outlook
17
18if __name__ == "__main__":
19  # Encode and pipe outlook to pasteboard
20  outlook_bytes = get_weather().encode()
21  Popen("pbcopy", stdin=PIPE).communicate(outlook_bytes)

As shown at the top, this is Python 3 code. I have a version written in Python 2 which is very similar. It uses the built-in ElementTree XML parser instead of the nicer Beautiful Soup used in this script as I both wanted to get my head around the interface and for reasons to do with the Python version at work.

Lines 8–10 set up variables needed to access the Met Office API, which is done in the get_weather function below.

Beautiful Soup is used to parse the API response in line 16. I love its dead simple method for finding elements, especially compared to ElementTree’s insistence that you provide the XML namespace:

pattern = (".//{www.metoffice.gov.uk/xml/metoRegionalFcst}" +
           "Period[@id='day3to5']")

My favourite part of the script is also the newest. If it is run directly from the command line (line 18) it pipes the forecast to the clipboard using pbcopy. I knew Python could start external processes but I was blown away by how easy this was. Previously the script printed the forecast and I used a shell alias to send it to the pasteboard. Yuck. This is much better.

The way Python 3 handles strings requires an encoding step in line 21, whereas Python 2 can just send a string through communicate — as it’s already bytes. This caught me out at first but otherwise it was incredibly simple to implement.

So, like I said, a trivial program but one that has made me eager to learn more Python.