Categories
Tech

Environment Canada Forecast from the Command Line

Here’s how to get an Environment Canada weather forecast from the command line. First, some sample output:

darren@unity:~% forecast
Edmonton (Int'l Aprt) - Weather - Environment Canada
No watches or warnings in effect, Edmonton (Int'l Aprt)
Current Conditions: Mostly Cloudy, -6.0 C
Monday: Chance of flurries. Temperature steady near -5. POP 30%
Monday night: Chance of flurries. Low -13. POP 30%
Tuesday: Chance of flurries. High -7. POP 30%
Tuesday night: Clear. Low -15.
Wednesday: Sunny. High -8.
Wednesday night: Clear. Low -16.
Thursday: Sunny. High -8.
Thursday night: Clear. Low -11.
Friday: Sunny. High +2.
Friday night: Clear. Low -10.
Saturday: Sunny. High +2.
Saturday night: Clear. Low -9.
Sunday: Sunny. High zero.

The code grabs the following RSS URL and then parses and formats it. Change the province and city code as needed:

And here’s the code, which colourizes the current day using ANSI escape sequences:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Gets and parses the forecast from the Weather Office RSS
#

DAY=`date +%A`

curl -s https://weather.gc.ca/rss/city/ab-71_e.xml | grep title | \
    sed -e 's,</title>,,g' \
        -e 's,<title>,,g' \
        -e 's,^ *,,g' \
        -e "s,$DAY,\x1B[1;34m$DAY\x1B[0m,g" \
        -e "s,Current Conditions,\x1B[1;35mCurrent Conditions\x1B[0m,g" \
        -e "s,minus ,-,g" \
        -e "s,plus ,+,g" \