‘Weather Forecast’ Calendar Service in PHP

The BBC provide 3 day weather RSS feeds for most locations in the UK. I thought it would be interesting to create a web service to turn the weather feed into calendar feed format, so I could have a constantly updated forecast of the next 3 days of weather mapped on to my iPhone’s calendar. Here it is on my iPhone:

Overview

The service is separated into five files:

• ical.php – this contains the class ical which corresponds to a single calendar feed. A method called ‘addevent’ allows you to add new events to the calendar, and a method called ‘returncal’ redirects the resulting calendar file to the browser so people can subscribe to it using their calendar application.
• forecast.php – this file contains the class forecast, which has properties for all aspects that we want to record for each day’s forecast, ie: Wind Speed and Humidity. It also contains the forecast set, which is a collection of forecast objects. The set class is serializable, which means each forecast object can be stored in a text file, including the Wind Speed, Humidity and all other things we want to record for each day.
• scrape-weather.php – this file contains code that scrapes the weather feed, populates the forecast set with all the weather information for the next 3 days, and stores the result in a file called forecasts.ser.
• forecasts.ser – this is all the data for the three day weather forecast, in serialized format. It is automatically deleted and recreated when the scrape-weather.php script is run.
• reader.php – this file converts the forecasts.ser file into an iCal calendar, and outputs the iCal formatted result to the calendar application that accesses reader.php page.

It uses two external libraries:

• MagpieRSS 0.72 – this popular library is used for reading the calendar RSS feed and converting it into a PHP object that is easier to manipulate by scrape-weather.php.
• iCalcreator 2.8 – this is used for creating the output iCal format of the calendar in ical.php and outputting it to the browser in reader.php.

Files

init();
	}	

	function init(){
		$config = array( 'unique_id' => 'weather.davidcraddock.net' );
		  // set Your unique id
		$this->v = new vcalendar( $config );
		  // create a new calendar instance

		$this->v->setProperty( 'method', 'PUBLISH' );
		  // required of some calendar software
		$this->v->setProperty( "x-wr-calname", "Calendar Sample" );
		  // required of some calendar software
		$this->v->setProperty( "X-WR-CALDESC", "Calendar Description" );
		  // required of some calendar software
		$this->v->setProperty( "X-WR-TIMEZONE", "Europe/London" );
		  // required of some calendar software
	}

	function addevent($start_year,$start_month,$start_day,$start_hour,$start_min,
		  $finish_year,$finish_month,$finish_day,$finish_hour,$finish_min,
		  $summary,$description,$comment		
	){
		$vevent = & $this->v->newComponent( 'vevent' );
		  // create an event calendar component
		$start = array( 'year'=>$start_year, 'month'=>$start_month, 'day'=>$start_day, 'hour'=>$start_hour, 'min'=>$start_min, 'sec'=>0 );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'dtstart', $start );
		$end = array( 'year'=>$finish_year, 'month'=>$finish_month, 'day'=>$finish_day, 'hour'=>$finish_hour, 'min'=>$finish_min, 'sec'=>0 );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'dtend', $end );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'LOCATION', '' );
		  // property name - case independent
		$vevent->setProperty( 'summary', $summary );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'description',$description );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'comment', $comment );
		$vevent->setProperty( 'attendee', 'contact@davidcraddock.net' );
	}

	function returncal(){
		// redirect calendar file to browser
		$this->v->returnCalendar();
	}
}
?>

forecasts = new ArrayObject();
	}
}

scrapecurrent();
		$this->store();
	}

	function store(){
		$store_path = $this->store_path;
		unlink($store_path);
		file_put_contents($store_path, serialize($this->set));
	}

	function scrapecurrent(){
		$url = $this->feed_url;
		$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
		$message = "";
		if(sizeof($rss->items) != 3){
			die("Problem with BBC weather feed.. dying");
		}
		$i=0;
		$set = new forecast_set();
		$curdate = date("Y-m-d");
		echo $curdate;
		foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
			$href = $item['link'];
			$title = $item['title'];
			$description = $item['description'];
			print_r($item);
			$curyear = date('Y',strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($curdate)) . " +1 day"));
			$curmonth = date('m',strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($curdate)) . " +1 day"));
			$curday = date('d',strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($curdate)) . " +1 day"));
			preg_match('/:.+?,/',$title,$summary);
			preg_match('/Min Temp:.+?-*d*/',$title,$mintemp);
			preg_match('/Max Temp:.+?-*d*/',$title,$maxtemp);
			preg_match('/Wind Speed:.+?-*d*/',$description,$windspeed);
			preg_match('/Humidity:.+?-*d*/',$description,$humidity);
			$summary[0] = str_replace(': ','',$summary[0]);
			$summary[0] = str_replace(',','',$summary[0]);
			$mintemp[0] = str_replace('Min Temp: ','',$mintemp[0]);
			$maxtemp[0] = str_replace('Max Temp: ','',$maxtemp[0]);
			$windspeed[0] = str_replace('Wind Speed: ','',$windspeed[0]);
			$humidity[0] = str_replace('Humidity: ','',$humidity[0]);
			$mins[$i] = (int)$mintemp[0];	
			$maxs[$i] = (int)$maxtemp[0];
			$forecast = new forecast();
			$forecast->low = (int)$mintemp[0];
			$forecast->high = (int)$maxtemp[0];
			$forecast->year = (int)$curyear;
			$forecast->month = (int)$curmonth;
			$forecast->day = (int)$curday;
			$forecast->windspeed = $windspeed[0];
			$forecast->humidity = $humidity[0];
			$forecast->summary = ucwords($summary[0]);
			$set->forecasts->append($forecast);
			$i++;	
			$curdate = date('Y-m-d',strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($curdate)) . " +1 day"));
		}
		print_r($set);
		$this->set = $set;

	}

}
$s = new scrape3day();

<?php
require_once('ical.php');
require_once('forecast.php');

$c = new ical();
$f = unserialize(file_get_contents('forecasts.ser'));
for($i=0;$iforecasts[$i];
	$weather_digest = "Max: ".$curforecast->high." Min: ".$curforecast->low." Humidity: ".$curforecast->humidity."% Wind Speed: ".$curforecast->windspeed."mph.";
	$c->addevent($curforecast->year,$curforecast->month,$curforecast->day,7,0,$curforecast->year,$curforecast->month,$curforecast->day,7,30,$curforecast->summary,$weather_digest,$weather_digest);
}
$c->returncal();
?>

SVN Version

If you have subversion, you can check out the project from: http://svn.davidcraddock.net/weather-services/. There are a couple extra files in that directory for my automated freezing weather alerts, but you can safely ignore those.

Installation

You will have to add this entry to your crontab to run once per day. You could set the script to run at midnight through adding the following:

0 0 * * *  

For example, in my case:

0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/php /home/david_craddock/work.davidcraddock.net/weather/scrape-weather.php 

You will then need to edit the contents of the $store_path and $feed_url variables in scrape-weather.php. Store_path should refer to a file path that the web server can create and edit files in, and feed_url should refer to the RSS feed of your local area that you have copied and pasted from the http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/ site, don’t use mine because your area is likely different. After that, you’re set to go.