I'm a scuba diver and spend a lot of my weekends sat around beaches, boats etc. Given that I'm in the UK, this often translates to being sat around in the rain, howling gales, and other inclement weather. Given that my dive days start early, or involve some travelling it would be nice to get some detailed information regarding the areas in which I'm diving.

Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you want to look at it), the diving often means that I'm away from the web & means of accessing weather information that is out there - the local weather information on the radio is sporadic to say the least and often amount to little more than "it's raining" or "it'll be sunny", nowhere near enough info.

So my problem was that while the info is available, I've no way of accessing it - so I came up with this script that will obtain a reasonably good marine forecast and send it to my mobile phone as a text message. Now this in itself presents problems, since we have a limited amount of text available - something like 120 characters and that's not much when we have to include all the various bits of into. So this code is called at regular intervals via cron, goes and grabs the forecast from the UK Meteorological Office, does some processing on the text and then sends it to my phone using an email to text gateway.

BTW, this is just for personal use, so I've assumed that copyright isn't a problem

If any one has any comments, feel free to pass them on

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

#---------------------------------------------------------------------
+----------
# Program: weather_mail
# Arguments: none
# Return value: undefined
#
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
+----------
require LWP::UserAgent;
use Mail::Mailer;

#
# OK, so the first thing is to go and get our forecast using HTTP::Req
+uest
#
# We get this from the British Meteorological Office on a specific pag
+e
# http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/offshore.html
#

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

#
# OK, we need to grab this through a proxy since we're behind a firewa
+ll
#
$ua->proxy('http', 'http://web-proxy.nn.nn.com:8088/');

#
# So go and grab the page
#
my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', 'http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafi
+les/offshore.html');
my $response = $ua->request($request);

#
# If it worked
#
if ($response->is_success) {
  $_ = $response->content;
  /^AT ([0-9]+).* ([0-9]+) ([A-Z]{3}).* ([0-9]{4})<BR>/mi;
  my $date_of_forecast = "ISSUED: $1 $2/$3/$4";

  $_ = $response->content;
  /(.*PORTLAND.*<BR>\n)((^.+<BR>\n)+)<P>/mi;

  my $forecast = sprintf("%s\n%s %s\n", $date_of_forecast, $1,$2);

  my %swaps = (#  From        To
                "OCCASIONALLY",     "OCC.",
                "MILES",            "M.",
                "SHOWER",           "SHWR",
                "RAIN",             "RN",
                "THUNDER",          "THNDR",
                " +",               " ",
                "ERLY",             "",
                "EXPECTED",         "EXP",
                "SLOW",             "SLW",
                "INCREASING",       "INC",
                "DECREASING",       "DEC",
                "NORTH",            "N.",
                "EAST",             "E.",
                "SOUTH",            "S.",
                "WEST",             "W.",
                "<BR>",             ""

              );

  foreach (keys(%swaps)) {
    $forecast =~ s/$_/$swaps{$_}/gi;
    }

    my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new;

  $mailer->open({ From    => "nn\@nn.co.uk",
                  To      => "nn\@nn.co.uk",
                  Subject => "",
                })
      or die "Can't open: $!\n";
    print $mailer $forecast;
    $mailer->close();



}
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