Baby, It’s Cold Outside

I don't know about your neck of the woods, but it is downright Arctic here. So I thought I'd polish up my PowerShell function to get weather data.

#requires -version 3.0

Function Get-MyWeather {
<#
.Synopsis
Get the weather for a US zip code
.Description
This command will query the Yahoo weather service and return weather conditions for a US zip code.
.Example
PS C:\> get-myweather 98133

Location    : Seattle, WA
Date        : 2/16/2015 4:53:00 AM
Temperature : 45
Low         : 38
High        : 60
Conditions  : Mostly Cloudy

.Notes
Learn more about PowerShell:
Essential PowerShell Learning Resources


  ****************************************************************
  * DO NOT USE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT UNTIL YOU HAVE TESTED *
  * THOROUGHLY IN A LAB ENVIRONMENT. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.  IF   *
  * YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS SCRIPT DOES OR HOW IT WORKS, *
  * DO NOT USE IT OUTSIDE OF A SECURE, TEST SETTING.             *
  ****************************************************************
.Link
Invoke-RestMethod
#>

Param(
[Parameter(Position=0,HelpMessage="Enter a United States zip code")]
[ValidateNotNullorEmpty()]
[string]$Zip='00000'
)

#construct the URI
$uri = "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=$Zip"

Try {
    #gets XML data
    $data = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $uri -ErrorAction Stop

    write-verbose ($data | out-string)
    if ($data.title -ne 'city not found') {

        #get title string and parse out location and time using
        #named regular expression captures
       
        $rx = "(?<location>\S+,\s\S+) at (?<time>\d{1,2}:\d{2}\s(a|p)m)"
        $data.title -match $rx | out-Null      
        Write-Verbose ($matches | out-string)
        $location = $matches.location
        $dt = $matches.time -as [datetime]

        #write a custom object to the pipeline
        [pscustomobject][ordered]@{
         Location    = $location
         Date        = $dt
         Temperature = $data.condition.temp -as [int]
         Low         = $data.forecast[0].low -as [int]
         High        = $data.forecast[0].high -as [int]
         Conditions  = $data.condition.text
        } #close hash table 
    }
    else {
        Write-Warning "No city found for zip code $zip"
    }
} #Try
Catch {
    #throw the exception
    Throw $_
}

} #end function

This function uses the Yahoo weather RSS feed for US locations. The function uses the Invoke-RestMethod to get an entry for a given zip code. I set my zip code as the default and suggest you do the same. You will need to modify the default value in the code above. Invoke-RestMethod gives me an XML document so it isn't too difficult to pull out the values I want and construct a custom object. I even use some regular expression named captures to break out the location and time. So hopefully there are some good learning examples here.

Anyway, quite frigid here, and this is already 5 degrees warmer than when I got up.

Hope you are staying warm.

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