Plain text

Software WxSim
1

Hi,
is there any list of the possible strings in plaintext.txt?
I would like to try to localize it but I would need to know the algorithm and strings used to combine and form the sentences and make sure I have all the possible words included. I was unable to find any documentation for this.

2

I had to ‘decode’ the strings a while back. Take a look at the plaintext-parser.php with plaintext-parser-data.txt … that handles the bulk of them
http://saratoga-weather.org/scripts-WXSIM.php#plaintext

3

Thanks Ken,
the problem is that on Linux I guess I cannot even install the trial

4

True… WXSIM/WXSIMATE are Windows only. I do have samples of plaintext.txt outputs from various stations I’d used to test the parser… I’ve attached them. They can let you test your parser without having to have WXSIM locally.

wxsim-plaintext-samples.zip (50.9 KB)

5

Thanks Ken!

This WxSim is a hard one :smiley: Working with something you do not personally have, which has zero documentation and logs/outputs that are not necessarily developer friendly :smiley:

EDIT: Ken could you please mail them to me, I cannot open the ZIP file link, I get an error.

6

The language used in plaintext.txt is nominally English, but with a ‘weatherese slant’. Tom shared some of his code with me a while back (2007) that showed how the sentences are constructed for the forecast. I generated a list of words/phrases used from that, and used it (along with the multiple samples) to test the parse code for plaintext-parser.php. The plaintext-parser-data.txt I’d included has the phrases used for precipitation amounts, and the ‘decision tree’ for picking an icon image based on the most-severe condition found in the text of each paragraph of the forecast. You might find that useful too :slight_smile:

7

Thanks, I already have a plugin for it, for the forecast I use the CSV file, this is just the text version, the only problem is that several users want it in their language :smiley: Thanks again, just if you could please email it to me, I cannot open that link for some reason I get an error and no download triggers.

8

Odd… the download link works for me, but I’ll email it to you :slight_smile:

9

Works fine for me too :?

10

Sorry, turned out to be an issue with my firewall…

Anyway, one more thing, it was pointed out to me that the times in the latest.csv are not correct, i.e. it does not take into account DST, which means half of the yr the time is incorrect. I already have a “fix” for the fact dates sometimes begin already at 11PM the previous day, is this another bug in the software? Any chance fixing this?

11

That’s correct that the latest.csv is always on standard time. I wanted to avoid the problems with changeover, like having two sets of the same time on the same date, or skipping a whole hour. It was a decision with pros and cons, but it was deliberate. I hope you can find a workaround. :slight_smile:

Tom