Finding a Weather Station

You can get a list of all the Weather Stations that are currently online, using a simple URL. This is because the database that all the Weather Stations upload data to has a RESTful API. This is a method by which you can write code that uses simple HTTP requests (just like a browser) to fetch the data.

Copy and paste the following URL into a web browser:

https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/raspberrypi/weatherstation/getallstations

data from weather stations in webpage

You should see a web page filled with data. This is a little difficult to read, though. Luckily, we can grab this data with a little Python code and then present it in a format that’s easier to read.

Open IDLE Python 3 to open the Python shell
Open a new file by clicking File > New File.
Save your program as fetch_stations.py.
The first thing you’ll need is a few Python modules. requests is not in the standard library, but you can install it using the instructions from the What you will need section.
```
from requests import get
import json
from pprint import pprint
```

The requests module allows you to fetch web pages from the World Wide Web. The json module allows you to easily read JSON data (which is a way of organising data into dictionaries). The pprint module is short for pretty-print, and just makes presenting text a little clearer.

The next thing to do is to save that URL you used earlier as a variable:

url = 'https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/raspberrypi/weatherstation/getallstations'

Using get from the requests module you can now fetch the data, and translate it into Python dictionaries using the json module:
```
stations = get(url).json()['items']
```
Save and run your code.
Type stations into the Python shell to have a look at the data.

look at the data in idle

It still looks pretty ugly. Try typing pprint(stations) and see what happens. You should see a huge list of Weather Stations dictionaries. Each dictionary should look something like this:
```
{'weather_stn_id': 1648902,
 'weather_stn_lat': 52.197834,
 'weather_stn_long': 0.125366,
 'weather_stn_name': 'ACRG_ROOF'}]
```

What you’re seeing is:

weather_stn_id – the unique ID of the station (weather_stn_id)
its location in the world (you will learn about this later in the project)
- weather_stn_lat – the latitude
- weather_stn_long – the longitude
weather_stn_name – the name of the Weather Station.

For the next part, you’re going to need to pick a Weather Station to fetch the weather from.

Scroll up and down the list and pick a weather_stn_id that you’d like to have a look at.

Fetching the weather

Finding a Weather Station