Still not purfekt at aviationweather.gov. Actually, it may be what caused the temporary problem yesterday. While testing my edits today, I'm getting occasional errors.
The culprit is a change in the METAR file when it has been deleted but not replaced with an actual METAR data file. Instead of making a nearly blank METAR file (which I had found to be happening earlier), they are now creating a very basic 404 html (version
2! Talk about backwards compatibility!
) page.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL
/data/observations/metar/stations/KORD.TXT
was not found on this server.</p>
</body>
</html>
I should be able to change my CRON script to catch the '404' error, but my skills are not up to that yet. Right now, I just check for the "<!DOCTYPE" text. That will work until they change the normal METAR data to be an actual html file!
Maybe by then I will have mastered the cURL checking scheme.