Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 5: Real-time weather client
Lecture: The user-friendly weather report
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The final step here is to report the weather, but in a nice way that users went to see that they expect. So instead of just printing
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out this random data structure, we're gonna go and do a print statement. So I'm gonna say print, little
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f-string, the weather and just put little curly braces there for some for a bit because we don't have it done yet, in some location,
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like Portland, is so many degrees, whatever the scale, Celsius, Fahrenheit and the condition is cloudy or something along those
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lines. Take that away just for a minute so it doesn't crash. So what we need is to get stuff like the location.
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So it would be easy to think we could just put like the location there, but remember, the location is this data structure,
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and it'll look weird. And it will say that the state is None some of the time. So what we need to do is get some location
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text. Let's say location_name, so get location name and we'll pass the location. Let's write this little bit here.
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And really, it all comes down to whether or not we have the name of a state or no state. So we'll say, "if not location.state"
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So there is no state specified then we just want to return a string that says "location dot city comma location dot country".
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Now there's a small problem here, It's gonna be lower case city and lower case country because we converted it that way,
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remember? We did all that lower stuff to canonicalize it to make sure we always sent the lower case thing to the server? Well, we wanna undo that.
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So now we can say "capitalize" here on this one. And then the country, remembers it was a two digit code which probably just wanna make that upper
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case. Now, if it's not the case that there is no state, so there is a state, we just want to add it in there,
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and it's gonna look like this because the state is an abbreviation as well, so we'll just put state there,
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and that's it. So let's just print out, comment that out for just a minute, on the way, location name. If I say, let's say Seattle,
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Washington, US, The weather in, look at that, Seattle, Washington, US. fantastic. Alright, So what else? What else do we got to do to make this work?
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Over here We have It's the temperature. So we're going to say the temp is easy. That's just "weather.temp" and the scale,
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let's just put it for a minute "f", we'll fix it in a second, let's say temp, scale, and then the condition as well, gonna be "whether.condition".
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Now, some of these we could actually just in line them like We don't need a separate thing for this, I guess, probably for the temp, either.
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But for the scale, we're gonna need some help. Let's go ahead and run this. See what we get. Make sure it's working. Boston, the weather in Boston,
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United States, is 53°F, clouds and overcast clouds. And I think in this condition where we created that,
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we'd already put a period. I didn't want the period there I don't think like there. Try one more time. Boston. Look at that. Perfect.
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The weather is 53.29°F. The last thing that actually make this legit is to determine whether that's an F or
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a C. And that's actually one of the easiest things we've done. So let's go over here and we'll just say "if whether.units equal imperial else
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the scale is C". So let's change where we're calling that just to make sure if we put metric over here, we should get the right answer.
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Boston and you spell it right, Boston, here we go. But are we, we are not getting right here,
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are we? Let's see. And I think that's because when we called this, I hard coded that into two places, which is never a good idea.
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But down here, we just wrote this right. So I think we wanna put units in here and pass it over. We don't have to pass it.
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It's with the data. So here we just do "data dot get units". Alright,
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try again. Boston. Look at that! See, now if we go and just change this to Imperial and Boston again, perfect. There it is.
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Our little scale is being shown. We can do one more thing on the scale to make it nicer. It would be better,
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I think, if this happened on its own place. So we can come over here and make a method called "get scale", something like that. This writes
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this little function so we don't have to worry about in-lining that, makes our code up here much simpler. Okay,
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so we're pretty much there. We can trim up some of those comments. Like, do we need to say show the header? show the header.
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No, those basically say the same thing. Convert Plain text, says the same thing. Call the weather
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API. Report the weather. This could even be a function that we create if we want called "report weather" that might be cool.
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Create a method called "report weather". Here we go. And now how much, how many comments do we need? We've got show header,
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what do you want to do, convert to plain text, call the API, report it. Super, super clean way to have our program working here.
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There's one final piece that we want to take care of to really put a nice cherry on the top.
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Now check this out. If I type Boston and miss the T, Boston, something crashed. This came back as "None"
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and we tried to get the units which made it crash right there in the get scale. What we need to do is there's a couple places like if they don't
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pass the, we were not able to create the location, right? They passed in nothing or something, we want to print "Could not find anything about
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the location" location, text let's say. Like that, and then return. Right. So now if we come in here and we just hit enter, couldn't
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find anything about that. There's also the same things happening right here. So if not whether, if it comes back
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as none, we'll say "could not get the weather for this place from the API". Now, if I put "bos", somewhere we're still printing that out, right?
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But it says could not get the weather for bos from the API, but if I do "Boston", perfect,
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that works. We got one stray print in here before we call it, totally good, maybe we want to keep it there,
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maybe we don't, right probably belong in some kind of logging or, I don't know, we could get the status code and try to make sense of
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that and so on. But I'm just gonna put it like this and call it done. So even though it sounds like quite a big deal,
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what we've done is pretty straightforward, right? We just do a little bit of string work to get the data in the right format, we call the weather
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API using requests which we've installed into our virtual environment using pip,
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and then we just take that dictionary data that came back and put it over and here, we just call request.get, make sure it was successful,
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JSON, and we're done. Beautiful. This is a really, really cool app, and I would consider it a real app.
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It has really error handling, it has real behaviors, super cool. Working with live data off of a live API, gotta love it.