Barattalo

Google has many usefull functions that give you data fast, such as cinema infos, or for meteo forecasts. I think that Google grabs those informations from the many sites indexed with his bots.

As I did on a previous post for words spelling you can retrieve those informations with some mini bots. The mini bot I’ve made for meteo retrieves informations from italian Google servers about weather forecast of a specified city (not only italian cities).

Since google gives only 4 days meteo if you ask for a date too much in the future it will return an empty string.

Below you can find the PHP source code, and here is a working demo!

This function is included in the Mini Bots Class.

function dayadd($days,$date=null , $format="d/m/Y"){
	//add days to a date function
	return date($format,strtotime($days." days",strtotime( $date ? $date : date($format) )));
}

function attr($s,$attrname) {
	//get the attribute value of an html tag
	preg_match_all('#\s*('.$attrname.')\s*=\s*["|\']([^"\']*)["|\']\s*#i', $s, $x);
	if (count($x)>=3) return $x[2][0];
	return "";
}

function doGoogleMeteo($q,$date) {
	if ($date>dayadd(3,date("Y-m-d"),"Y-m-d"))return "";

	// grab google page with meteo query
	$web_page = file_get_contents( "http://www.google.it/search?q=meteo+" . urlencode($q) );

	//parse html to find data, and store them in an array
	preg_match_all('#<div class=e>(.*)</table>#Us', $web_page, $m);
	if (count($m)>0) {
		$p = array();
		preg_match_all('#<img([^>]*)?>#Us', $m[0][0], $img);
		for ($i=0;$i<count($img[0]);$i++) {
			$tag = str_replace("src=\"/","src=\"http://www.google.it/",$img[0][$i]);
			$p[dayadd($i,date("Y-m-d"),"Y-m-d")]["title"] = attr($tag,"title");
			$p[dayadd($i,date("Y-m-d"),"Y-m-d")]["img"] = attr($tag,"src");
		}
		preg_match_all('#<nobr>(.*)</nobr>#Uis', $m[0][0], $nobr);
		for ($i=0;$i<count($nobr[1]);$i++) {
			$temp= explode("|",$nobr[1][$i]);
			$p[dayadd($i,date("Y-m-d"),"Y-m-d")]["min"] = trim($temp[1]);
			$p[dayadd($i,date("Y-m-d"),"Y-m-d")]["max"] = trim($temp[0]);
		}
		return $p[$date];
	}

	return "nada.";
}

print_r ( doGoogleMeteo("milano","2009-12-25") );
//Array (
// [title] => Rovesci
// [img] => http://www.google.it/images/weather/rain.gif
// [min] => -4°C
// [max] => 7°C
//)

Tags: bot, File_get_contents, forecast, Google, meteo, Mini Bots Class, Preg_match_all, Spider, weather, Web bot