Road Traffic Check

Hi All

I travel along the M62 to get to work and the traffic is a bit of a pain. I wrote this simple LWP script to grab traffic reports from RAC website and pick out those of interest to me.

The code does rely on the structure of the web page not changing which is not the best solution, so if any Monks out there know of a structured source for traffic reports, i'd like to hear from you.

Regards
Orthanc

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;

$|              = 1;
$url            = "http://www.rac.co.uk/scripts/traffic.htt?area=5";
$res_okay       = 1;

$req_motorway = ($ARGV[0]) ? $ARGV[0] : "M62|A58";
$req_motorway =~ s/\,/\|/g;

$clear = `clear`;
print "$clear";
print "Getting reports for $req_motorway\n\n";

@html=get("$url");
foreach (@html) { $html .= $_; }
@htmllines = split(/\n/,$html);
%motorways = ();

foreach (@htmllines) {

        if(/bodytextonehead/) {
                m/bodytextonehead\"\>(.*)\</i;
                $mway = "$1|$i";
                }
        if(/bodytexttwo/ && /\|/) {
                m/bodytexttwo\"\>\| (.*) \|\</i;
                $motorways{$mway}{'time'} = $1;

                m/ltnbaro_0(\d+)\.gif/i;
                $motorways{$mway}{'baro'} = $1;
                }
        if(/bodytexttwofade/) {
                m/bodytexttwofade\"\>(.*)\<\/FONT/i;
                $motorways{$mway}{'report'} = $1;
                $motorways{$mway}{'report'} =~ s/'/\'/g;
                $motorways{$mway}{'report'} =~ s/&/\&/g;
                }

        $i++;
        }

foreach $key (keys %motorways) {
        ($mway,$x) = split(/\|/,$key);
        next if($mway !~ m/$req_motorway/);

        print "$mway\n";
        print "Time: $motorways{$key}{'time'}\n";
        print "Baro: $motorways{$key}{'baro'}\n";
        print "Report: $motorways{$key}{'report'}\n";
}
exit;
[download]

Comment on Road Traffic Check Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Road Traffic Check by ar0n (Priest) on Jun 20, 2000 at 01:00 UTC
I am by no means an expert, but, as a Good Monk there are just some things I need to say. Cool! print `clear`; instead of first setting up a variable is easier stripping every newline character from an array can be done easier by doing a chomp(@html), so your code would look thusly: `chomp(@html = get($url));` [download] Also, I believe `while(@html) { #parse code here }` [download] is faster than foreach since it doesn't need to load the whole array, just one line at a time. neato application of LWP, though... :-) -- ar0n	[reply] [d/l] [select]
RE: RE: Road Traffic Check by merlyn (Sage) on Jun 20, 2000 at 01:22 UTC
`system 'clear';` [download] is even easier than print `clear`; [download] -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply] [d/l] [select]
RE: Road Traffic Check by Odud (Pilgrim) on Jun 20, 2000 at 23:17 UTC
I used to live in the Manchester area - you have my sympathy if you travel the motorways every day. Did they ever finish the motorway ring around Manchester? - when I was there it petered out around Stockport.	[reply]
RE: RE: Road Traffic Check by orthanc (Monk) on Jun 21, 2000 at 12:19 UTC
I only travel from one junction to the next between Leeds and Halifax. The problem is that it is the busiest part. This helps me decide whether to go through Bradford instead. To anyone: Does anyone have any info about a source for traffic reports?, no one replied. Orthanc	[reply]