Perl checks for rain and issues umbrella warning
Rain Check
A Perl script that retrieves the current weather forecast at dawn helps the Perlmeister decide whether to run the risk or take an umbrella just in case.
In the wet season, the question often arises as to whether rain or snow will fall from the sky during the day and therefore whether it might be advisable to take an umbrella with me to work.
Underground Weather
Ultimately, however, even occasional rain showers around noon would be irrelevant, as long as you could navigate the commute to and from work without getting wet. Luckily, the Weather Underground [1] weather service offers free forecasts for the day. Although they are certainly not 100 percent accurate, they do beat human intuition by a mile.
On CPAN, Perl programmers will find the WWW::Wunderground::API module, which uses a script to fetch the weather data from the server thanks to a free API developer key [2] procured especially for that purpose. The simple script in Listing 1 uses the module; it iterates over the hourly entries in the bulk of JSON data returned and outputs the time and the probability of rain for each hour sent in the pop (probability of precipitation) [3] entry.
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