They're free, but use at your own risk

The scripts in PHP and Perl referenced here are used in the operation of this weather station, and may be freely copied and used to support your station. Please note that you use these scripts at your own risk. No warranty is expressed or implied. I accept no liability for any damages that may ensue from their use.
You will need to configure them for your own particular station website.
 A RSS Feed is available to help keep you informed on updates to the scripts.

If you find one or more of the scripts useful to you, please consider making a small donation to help offset the routine expenses of operation of this website. Thanks for your kind support!

A Version History is available -- check back from time to time to see if there are updates to scripts you have downloaded earlier. Announcements of version updates and new scripts are made on WXForum.net and Weather-Watch forums as they become available.

This page was updated Tuesday, 01-Sep-2009 2:40 PM

WXSIM forecast formatting scripts

Tom Ehrensberger has created a great program called WXSIM to create text weather forecasts based on observation data from public sources and your own weather station. The program produces a text file (plaintext.txt) that has a detailed forecast like this:

   WXSIM text forecast for Saratoga, initialized at  8:00 AM Mar 24, 2007
 _______________________________________________________________________________
 
 Today: Partly cloudy in the morning, becoming partly to mostly cloudy in the
 afternoon. Patchy light fog in the morning. High 71. UV index up to 6. Wind west
 around 2 mph in the morning, becoming 7 mph in the afternoon.
 
 Tonight: Mostly cloudy to cloudy in the evening, becoming cloudy after midnight.
 A slight chance of rain. Low 51. Wind west around 4 mph. Chance of precipitation
 less than 20 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of an inch.
 
 Sunday: Cloudy. A slight chance of rain. High 63. Wind west around 3 mph. Chance
 of precipitation less than 20 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of
 an inch.
 
 Sunday night: Cloudy. A slight chance of rain. Low 50. Wind west around 2 mph in
 the evening, becoming south-southwest after midnight. Chance of precipitation
 less than 20 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of an inch.
 
 Monday: Cloudy in the morning, becoming mostly cloudy to cloudy in the
 afternoon. Patchy light fog in the afternoon. A chance of rain in the morning,
 then rain likely in the afternoon. High 57. Wind southwest around 7 mph, gusting
 to 14 mph, in the morning, becoming 12 mph in the afternoon. Chance of
 precipitation 70 percent. Precipitation mostly between half an inch and one inch.
 
 Monday night: Cloudy. Light to moderate fog. Rain likely. Low 50. Wind west
 around 6 mph. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. Precipitation mostly around a
 quarter of an inch.
 
 Tuesday: Mostly cloudy in the morning, becoming partly to mostly cloudy in the
 afternoon. Light to moderate fog in the morning. A chance of rain. High 58. UV
 index up to 6. Wind west around 6 mph, gusting to 13 mph, in the morning,
 becoming 15 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 20 percent.
 Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of an inch.
 
 Tuesday night: Partly to mostly cloudy in the evening, becoming fair to partly
 cloudy after midnight. Low 41. Wind northwest around 10 mph, gusting to 16 mph,
 in the evening, becoming 6 mph after midnight.
 
 Wednesday: Mostly sunny in the morning, becoming sunny in the afternoon. High
 61. UV index up to 8. Wind north-northwest around 5 mph.
 
 Wednesday night: Clear. Low 38. Wind northwest around 6 mph.
 
 * THIS FORECAST WAS MADE IN AUTOMATED MODE AND MAY BE LESS ACCURATE THAN OTHERWISE *

These scripts will read the plaintext.txt forecast and produce other displays of the information including condition icons, and translate the English to other languages.

plaintext-parser.php (NOAA-style WXSIM forecast display - multilingual)

I started this script based on an idea from Gerard in the Netherlands. He had adapted Jordan Gerth's wsofd.php script to convert the plaintext.txt English forecast into Dutch. (see the Weather-Watch.com thread here).
I thought this was a great idea to make WXSIM output available in multiple languages. I wrote the plaintext-parser.php to create a carterlake-style forecast output that would use the carterlake (NOAA) icon set, would be easy to include in a weather website, and have built-in support for translations to other languages.

My special thanks go to Jordan Gerth for creating the first set of plaintext.txt parsing/display functions, to Gerard for his pioneering work on a Dutch translation, and to the folks who generated the language translation files (listed below) that this script uses. Thanks to your all! I hope you enjoy the script/translations .. this was truly an international effort.

The plaintext.txt forecast by WXSIM is a shorthand form of the English language which is easily recognizable by native speakers, as similar words/phrases are used by our National Weather Service, TV, radio and newspapers. This "weather speak" usually has only nouns and adjectives (with prepositions, conjunctions and articles) and no verbs, so it is not necessarily a fully grammatical English sentence. Likewise, the translations are not intended to be full translations (since they also have no verbs), but are recognizable and informative to native speakers as "weather speak", just like the English "weather speak' from which they are derived.

The translation is performed by an ordered set of substitutions arranged in the plaintext-parser-lang-XX.txt file which is applied to the English plaintext.txt output of WXSIM. The result is a set of Icons depicting the prevailing condition during the period, along with the High/Low temperature and UV Index forecast. The text part of the forecast is translated in the same manner. If no language file is found, the forecast defaults to English.

Settings in the plaintext-parser.php script

// Settings ---------------------------------------------------------------
$iconDir ='./forecast/images/';           // directory for carterlake icons
$WXSIMstation = "Saratoga-Weather.org";   // name of your weather station
$plaintextFile = './plaintext.txt';       // location of the WXSIM plaintext.txt
$lang = 'en';                             // default language is 'en' = English
$tempDegrees = '°';                   // set to '' to omit degree sign
//                                        //   or set to '°', '°F' or '°C'
$maxWidth = '640px';                      // max width of tables (could be '100%')
$minPoP = '40';                           // PoP must be this or above to display
//                                        // rain icon, otherwise sky icon w/PoP displayed.
$showBeaufort = 'T';                      // set to false to not display Beaufort at all
//                                        // ='V' for 'n Bft', ='T' for translated name
// ---- end of settings ---------------------------------------------------

Make sure that $iconDir points to the relative URL address of your carterlake Icon set, and that $plaintextFile points to the relative URL address of your WXSIM plaintext.txt file on your website.
Change $WXSIMstation to the text you'd like to appear in the heading of the forecast page.
Change $lang to to the ISO abbreviation for the country from the language files listed below (if you want to change the default language from English).

More documentation is contained in the script itself about variable names/arrays made available, and the contents. The samples below serve to illustrate some of the possible usages on your weather website.

Usage samples

will show:
Language: | Afrikaans | български език | Català | Dansk | Nederlands | English | Suomi | Français | Deutsch | Ελληνικά | Italiano | Norsk | Polski | Português | Español | Svenska |

WXSIM Forecast for: Saratoga Issued by: Saratoga-Weather.org

Updated: Monday, 08-Feb-2010 11:00 pm

Rest of tonight Chance rain Tuesday Rain likely Tuesday night Fog Wednesday Fog a.m. Wednesday night Partly Cloudy Thursday Partly Cloudy Thursday night Partly Cloudy Friday Rain likely Friday night Fog late <.25 in. .35 in. <.1 in. <.1 in. .25 in. Low: 46° High: 49° Low: 45° High: 60° Low: 42° High: 61° Low: 46° High: 51° Low: 43° ESE 3 mph Light air E→NE 2 mph Light air NNE calm Calm N→WNW 2 mph Light air WNW→E calm Calm SSE→SW 3 mph Light air SW→SSE 4 mph Light breeze SSE 9→3-10 mph Gentle breeze N 2 mph Light air UV: 3  Medium  UV: 2  Low

 

Rest of tonight	Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. A chance of rain. Low 46°. Wind east-southeast around 3 mph. Chance of precipitation 50 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a quarter of an inch.
Tuesday	Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. Rain likely in the morning, then a chance of rain in the afternoon. High 49°. Wind east around 2 mph in the morning, becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 70 percent. Precipitation mostly between a quarter and half an inch.
Tuesday night	Cloudy in the evening, becoming mostly cloudy after midnight. Patchy light fog. A slight chance of rain. Low 45°. Wind north-northeast near calm. Chance of precipitation 20 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of an inch.
Wednesday	Mostly sunny. Patchy light fog in the morning. High 60°. UV index up to 3. Wind north around 2 mph in the morning, becoming west-northwest in the afternoon.
Wednesday night	Partly cloudy in the evening, becoming fair to partly cloudy after midnight. Low 42°. Wind west-northwest near calm in the evening, becoming east after midnight.
Thursday	Partly cloudy. High 61°. UV index up to 2. Wind south-southeast around 3 mph in the morning, becoming southwest in the afternoon.
Thursday night	Fair to partly cloudy in the evening, becoming partly cloudy after midnight. A slight chance of rain after midnight. Low 46°. Wind southwest around 4 mph in the evening, becoming south-southeast after midnight. Chance of precipitation 20 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a tenth of an inch.
Friday	Mostly cloudy to cloudy in the morning, becoming cloudy in the afternoon. Patchy light fog. Rain likely. High 51°. Wind south-southeast around 9 mph in the morning, becoming 3 mph, gusting to 10 mph, in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. Precipitation mostly around a quarter of an inch.
Friday night	Partly cloudy in the evening, becoming clear after midnight. Light to moderate fog in the evening, then moderate fog after midnight. Low 43°. Wind north around 2 mph.

WXSIM forecast formatting script by Saratoga-Weather.org.

You can also include it 'silently' and print just a few (or all) the contents where you'd like it on the page

then on your page, the following code would display just the current and next time period forecast:

Rest of tonight Chance rain	Tuesday Rain likely
Low: 46°	High: 49°

Or if you'd like to include the immediate forecast with text for the next two cycles:

Rest of tonight Chance rain Low: 46°	Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. A chance of rain. Low 46°. Wind east-southeast around 3 mph. Chance of precipitation 50 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a quarter of an inch.
Tuesday Rain likely High: 49°	Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. Rain likely in the morning, then a chance of rain in the afternoon. High 49°. Wind east around 2 mph in the morning, becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 70 percent. Precipitation mostly between a quarter and half an inch.

You can also present the NWS and WXSIM forecasts together by using:

NWS	WXSIM	Forecast
Overnight Chance Showers Lo 40 °F	Rest of tonight Chance rain Low: 46°	NWS: A chance of showers. Cloudy, with a low around 40. Light south wind. Chance of precipitation is 40%. WXSIM: Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. A chance of rain. Low 46°. Wind east-southeast around 3 mph. Chance of precipitation 50 percent. Precipitation mostly less than a quarter of an inch.
Tuesday Tstms Hi 49 °F	Tuesday Rain likely High: 49°	NWS: Showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 4pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. High near 49. Southeast wind 5 to 7 mph becoming northwest. Chance of precipitation is 80%. WXSIM: Dense overcast. Patchy light fog. Rain likely in the morning, then a chance of rain in the afternoon. High 49°. Wind east around 2 mph in the morning, becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 70 percent. Precipitation mostly between a quarter and half an inch.

If you'd like to style the output, you can easily do so by setting a CSS for class WXSIMforecast either in your CSS file or on the page including the plaintext-parser.php (in include mode):

<style type="text/css">  
.WXSIMforecast {  
    font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;  
    font-size: 9pt;  
}  
</style>

Installation of plaintext-parser.php

Download plaintext-parser.php and plaintext-parser-data.txt from links below and place in same directory on your website. The document root directory is prefered, although the script can be located in a subdirectory as long as the relative addressing of the icons is changed in the script.

Download the Icon set (or just the Add-on Icons if you already have the Carterlake NOAA Icon set), and upload to /forecast/images directory.

Change settings in plaintext-parser.php to reflect location of your plaintext.txt file from WXSIM and the relative URL address of the icons if necessary and upload the modified plaintext-parser.php to your website.

For additional languages, download one or more language plugin files and upload to the same directory as the plaintext-parser.php. You can change plaintext-parser '$lang =' setting to the default language of your choice.

Download: plaintext-parser.php (Version 1.17) and plaintext-parser-data.txt (Version 1.05) (both files are required)
Download: Icon Set (upload to your website in the /forecast/images directory)
Note: If you have the icon set from Tom ( http://members.cox.net/carterlakeweather/forecasticons.zip)
then please download Add-on Icons to Tom's set and upload to your /forecast/images directory.
It contains images to support the "show sky conditions when chance rain and PoP < $minPoP" logic.

Optional language translation plugins: (install in same directory as plaintext-parser.php)

Note: if you'd like to generate a language translation file for a new language, please let me know .. I'm happy to support your efforts!

plaintext-rss.php - WXSIM Forecast RSS Feed Script

This script is an add-on to the plaintext-parser.php script described above. The script will generate a valid RSS 2.0 XML feed for your forecast. with full support for all language translations supplied with plaintext-parser.php.

To install, download the script (link below) and place in SAME DIRECTORY as plaintext-parser.php. You'll also need to use V1.03 or later of the plaintext-parser.php script as it has some minor changes to make the XML generation work properly. Then change the settings in plaintext-rss.php to match your local configuration:

// Settings ---------------------------------------------------------------
//
  $ourTZ = "PST8PDT";  //NOTE: this *MUST* be set correctly to
// translate UTC times to your LOCAL time for the displays.
//  http://saratoga-weather.org/timezone.txt  has the list of timezone names
//  pick the one that is closest to your location and put in $ourTZ
// also available is the list of country codes (helpful to pick your zone
//  from the timezone.txt table
//  http://saratoga-weather.org/country-codes.txt : list of country codes
  $ourLinkPage = '/WXSIM-forecast.php'; // set to your page name to display
//				// the full forecast using your template
  $ourEmail = 'webmaster@saratoga-weather.org';  // set to your email address
//
  $absIconDir = '/forecast/images/'; // set to absolute web address of images
//                                       without './' or '../' and include
//                                       trailing '/'
// ---- end of settings ---------------------------------------------------

Set $ourTZ to the timezone for your forecast.
Set $ourLinkPage to the relative (from the document root of your website) address for your detailed WXSIM forecast page.
Set $ourEmail to YOUR email address (webmaster@your.site.com).
Set $absIconDir to the web address of your Icons directory (starting at the document root of your website). This is probably the most vexing setting to make as it has to be perfect to make the images appear in the RSS feed. It should be the same as the plaintext-parser.php $iconDir with all the relative addressing resolved. Here's some samples to give you an idea about how it should be set. it assumes that the icons are in ./forecast/images/ dir :

Download plaintext-rss.php (V1.05 - 19-Aug-2009) Version History

Demo of script:
Language: | Afrikaans | български език | Català | Dansk | Nederlands | English | Suomi | Français | Deutsch | Ελληνικά | Italiano | Norsk | Polski | Português | Español | Svenska |