[Tutor] weather scraping with Beautiful Soup

Kent Johnson kent37 at tds.net
Fri Jul 17 14:09:10 CEST 2009


On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:21 PM, Che M<pine508 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am interested in gathering simple weather data using Beautiful Soup, but
> am having trouble understanding what I'm doing.  I have searched the
> archives and so far haven't found enough to get me moving forward.
>
> Basically I am trying to start off this example:
>
> Grabbing Weather Underground Data with BeautifulSoup
> http://flowingdata.com/2007/07/09/grabbing-weather-underground-data-with-beautifulsoup/
>
> But I get to the exact same problem that this other person got to in this
> post:
> http://groups.google.com/group/beautifulsoup/browse_thread/thread/13eb3dbf713b8a4a
>
> Unfortunately, that post never gives enough help for me to understand how to
> solve that person's or my problem.
>
> What I want to understand is how to find the bits of data you want--in this
> case, say, today's average temperature and whether it was clear or
> cloudy--within a web page, and then indicate that to Beautiful Soup.

One thing that might help is to use the Lite page, if you are not
already. It has much less formatting and extraneous information to
wade through. You might also look for a site that has weather data
formatted for computer. For example the NOAA has forcast data
available as plain text:
http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=BOX&product=CCF&format=txt&version=1&glossary=0

Kent


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