Automated downloading of NOAA radar images

Inspired by Develop your own weather maps and alerts with Perl and GD, I have put together a script which downloads the base radar image from a specific site at a specified interval.

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use POSIX;


my $refresh = 1800;

do {



    my $base="http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/RadarImg/N0R/MTX_N0R_0.gi
+f";
    
    my $timestring = strftime( "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S", gmtime() );

    

    my $savefilename = "SLCRadar_".$timestring.".gif";
    my $status = getstore($base,$savefilename);
        print $status."\n" ;


sleep $refresh;

} while ($refresh);
[download]

See my Standard Code Disclaimer

Comment on Automated downloading of NOAA radar images Download Code

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Re: Automated downloading of NOAA radar images by merlyn (Sage) on Jun 13, 2007 at 23:28 UTC
I don't see `$refresh` changing in the loop, so I'm not sure why you have a do-while $refresh. If you just want an infinite loop, a naked block with a redo at the end will do nice. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re^2: Automated downloading of NOAA radar images by Scott7477 (Chaplain) on Jun 14, 2007 at 15:10 UTC
Thanks for the tip, merlyn, I have "refactored" my code as follows: `use strict; use LWP::Simple; use POSIX; my $refresh = 1800; { &imagegrab; sleep $refresh; redo; } sub imagegrab { my $base="http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/RadarImg/N0R/MTX_N0R_0.gi +f"; my $timestring = strftime( "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S", gmtime() ); my $savefilename = "SLCRadar_".$timestring.".gif"; my $status = getstore($base,$savefilename); print $status."\n" ; }` [download] It does seem a cleaner way to handle this... See my Standard Code Disclaimer	[reply] [d/l]
(OT) Re^2: Automated downloading of NOAA radar images by Argel (Prior) on Jun 18, 2007 at 21:28 UTC
I know it doesn't really matter in this case but generally speaking isn't a while(1) block a better choice for infinite looping? I would think performance would be the same (I assume a while block collapses down to a naked-redo block) which leaves code readability. And letting the reader know at the beginning of the block that it's an infinite loop is a lot better than forcing the reader to wade through several lines of code before discovering that. Is that a good assessment or am I missing something?	[reply]