In this lab, you will work with a script that scrapes the 5-day weather forecast from the National Weather Service website. The script extracts information from multiple elements listed under the same class name using the BeautifulSoup library.
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Download the
NWS_WeatherForecast.pyfile and run it in your local IDE or open it, then copy/paste it into a code cell in a new Colab notebook. -
Read the description and comments in the script to understand the purpose of the script
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Run the script. You will see some packages being installed when you run it for the first time.
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The script returns the 5-day forecast for Worcester, MA (Lat: 42.2634, Lon: -71.8022) with the latitude and longitude information provided. Using the latitude and longitude values, it generates the following URL through string concatenation: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.2634&lon=-71.8022
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Open this URL in a Firefox or Chrome browser. Locate the information that is being outputted in our script. Right click on this and select the Inspect Element option. This will launch the Inspector window that helps locate different elements on the page.
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Notice that all forecast containers in this section are located in the forecast-tombstone class inside the li tag. In order to scrape multiple elements listed under the same class name, we utilize the findAll() function from BeautifulSoup. The tag and class names are required arguments for this function.
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Take latitude and longitude values as inputs in decimal degrees from user
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Convert the latitude and longitude values to strings to generate the URL for the selected location. Pass this URL as an argument in the get() request.
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The returned forecast information did not preserve its spacing during the scraping process. Using the replace() function, fix any spacing issues with the output
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Convert the final output to uppercase
Remember to update the Script1.py file to include comments and documentation in your script to tell me what it’s doing!
For this script, you will complete the assignment that you have proposed, which involves creating a new script, completing an online tutorial, or modifying a previous exercise or lab. You'll need to save that file or notebook into this repo: be sure to include comments and documentation in your script to tell me what it’s doing!
Your write-up will be here, on this README page. You will need to edit this page with your new text: you do not need to keep these instructions on your README!