Morning

Todays bash question comes from my weather script. Which is the bit that assembles all the various components into the ANSI/ASCII pages for the bbs
and conversion to png for the web page. Now the bureau of meteorology throw out a string like so.

humid. showers and storms.
partly cloudy. late smoke haze.
early shower. partly cloudy.
showers developing. windy.
partly cloudy. cool and windy afternoon.
possible late shower.

Based on this, I try and select 1 appropriate icon to add to the page. The present logic which seemed alright originally but has spiralled wildly out of control is a case statement that contains every permutation of weather that has
ever come along. Making it both realllllly long and reallly inefficient.

I have a series of 9 icons for varying weather conditions. Cloud, partly cloudy (or partly sunny), sunny, rain, lightning, snow, thunder storm, rain clearing or showers. So I need to try and search the above strings for a keyword to select to most applicable icon.

I have no real idea how to manage that effectively.. any ideas?

Spec


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On 18 Feb 2020 at 08:45a, Spectre pondered and said...

Todays bash question comes from my weather script. Which is the bit that assembles all the various components into the ANSI/ASCII pages for the bbs and conversion to png for the web page. Now the bureau of meteorology throw out a string like so.

There comes a point in every Unix user's life where you
start to realize that the shell has limits and isn't the
best tool for everything. In particular, the program
you are writing may not be well-suited as a shell script.

[snip]
Based on this, I try and select 1 appropriate icon to add to the page. The present logic which seemed alright originally but has spiralled
wildly out of control is a case statement that contains every
permutation of weather that has ever come along. Making it both realllllly long and reallly inefficient.

I have a series of 9 icons for varying weather conditions. Cloud, partly cloudy (or partly sunny), sunny, rain, lightning, snow, thunder storm, rain clearing or showers. So I need to try and search the above strings for a keyword to select to most applicable icon.

It sounds like what you may want is an ordered set of
regular expressions, and mapping those to an icon. You
use the ordering to model weights; "it's raining cats
and dogs" means "rain" even if it also says, "it may
clear up later."

This implies a pattern/action language may be well
suited to the task; I'd take a close look at `awk`.
Something like:

/it is raining/ {
print "rain"
next
}
/it is kinda (cloudy|sunny)/ {
print "partly cloudy"
next
}

Etc....

It'd be helpful to see what your script does now, but
please goodness not in the BBS interface; put it on
github or in a gist or on a web page somewhere.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A44 2020/02/04 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

There comes a point in every Unix user's life where you start to
realize that the shell has limits and isn't the best tool for
everything. In particular, the program you are writing may not be well-suited as a shell script.

But there is also, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

expressions, and mapping those to an icon. You use the ordering
to model weights; "it's raining cats and dogs" means "rain" even
if it also says, "it may clear up later."

This implies a pattern/action language may be well suited to the
task; I'd take a close look at `awk`. Something like:

/it is raining/ { print "rain" next } /it is kinda (cloudy|sunny)/
{ print "partly cloudy" next }
It'd be helpful to see what your script does now, but please goodness
not in the BBS interface; put it on github or in a gist or on a web
page somewhere.

Chuckle, like I said its a massive case statement.. match case, copy file.. about the only intelligent thing in there is that it shows what the conditions tend to look like.

I'll have to consider AWK never had much joy with it, even less than I've had with sed which is pretty hard to manage. Ta.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

On 02-18-20 16:26, Spectre wrote to tenser <=-

I'll have to consider AWK never had much joy with it, even less than
I've had with sed which is pretty hard to manage. Ta.

I've never tried AWK, other than using scripts others have written, but I have found sed extremely useful for many things. I love sed, though I generally refer to the man page each time I use it. :)


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but I have found sed extremely useful for many things. I love sed,
though I generally refer to the man page each time I use it. :)

The only thing I use said for is string substitution or deletion... the rest of
it seems to be an obscure alien science to me.

Spec


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On 02-19-20 15:14, Spectre wrote to Vk3jed <=-

but I have found sed extremely useful for many things. I love sed,
though I generally refer to the man page each time I use it. :)

The only thing I use said for is string substitution or deletion... the rest of
it seems to be an obscure alien science to me.

That's what I use sed for, including converting all input to lower or uppercase as needed. :)


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