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Parse BOM Précis Forecast XML Files

Source: R/parse_precis_forecast.R
parse_precis_forecast.Rd

Parse local BOM daily précis forecast XML file(s) of the seven-day town forecasts for a specified state or territory or all Australia. Ported from bomrang.

Usage

parse_precis_forecast(state, filepath)

Arguments

state

Required value of an Australian state or territory as full name or postal code. Fuzzy string matching via base::agrep() is done.

filepath

A string providing the directory location of the précis file(s) to parse. See Details for more.

Value

A data.table::data.table() of Australia BOM précis seven-day forecasts for BOM selected towns.

Details

Allowed state and territory postal codes, only one state per request or all using 'AUS'.

ACT

Australian Capital Territory (will return NSW)

NSW

New South Wales

NT

Northern Territory

QLD

Queensland

SA

South Australia

TAS

Tasmania

VIC

Victoria

WA

Western Australia

AUS

Australia, returns forecast for all states, NT and ACT

The filepath argument will only accept a directory where files are located for parsing. DO NOT supply the full path including the file name. This function will only parse the requested state or all of Australia in the same fashion as get_precis_forecast(), provided that the files are all present in the directory.

References

Forecast data come from Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Weather Data Services
http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml

Location data and other metadata for towns come from the BOM anonymous FTP server with spatial data
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/adfd/spatial/, specifically the DBF file portion of a shapefile,
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/adfd/spatial/IDM00013.dbf

See also

get_precis_forecast

Other BOM: find_forecast_towns(), get_ag_bulletin(), get_available_imagery(), get_available_radar(), get_coastal_forecast(), get_precis_forecast(), get_radar_imagery(), get_satellite_imagery(), parse_ag_bulletin(), parse_coastal_forecast()

Other parse: parse_ag_bulletin(), parse_coastal_forecast()

Author

Adam H. Sparks, adamhsparks@gmail.com, and Keith Pembleton, keith.pembleton@usq.edu.au, and Paul Melloy, paul@melloy.com.au

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive()

# parse the short forecast for Western Australia

# download to tempfile() using basename() to keep original name
utils::download.file(url = "ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDQ11295.xml",
              destfile = file.path(tempdir(),
              basename("ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDQ11295.xml")),
              mode = "wb")

parse_precis_forecast(state = "QLD", filepath = tempdir())
}