nwsForecast: weather icons not loading

[danb35]

I'm not sure if this is a common cause with my other thread, so I've made a new one. The nwsForecast block is loading the forecast data OK, but the images representing the forecast aren't:

Screenshot 2025-10-06 at 14.33.08.png (55.7 KiB) Viewed 7038 times

MT 19.0. Where should I be looking for this problem?

[FSC830]

Hi,
I dont use this block, but it looks like the path to the icons is not correct.
Or it is may be an issue at browser side.

Oh, just seen in your other post that you did a new install, so may be here are some PHP8 issues possible to.

Regards

[danb35]

Well, I'm pretty sure this is at least part of the problem--it looks as though the icons are loaded via http. From line 179 of nwsForecastBlock.php:

Code: Select all

							<img src="http://forecast.weather.gov/<?php echo $iconsSevenDay[1][$i]?>" class="nwsForecastIconImg">

Since I serve my site via HTTPS, this is likely to be a problem. Maybe not the whole problem, but almost certainly a problem.

But that doesn't seem to be everything; the "echo $iconsSevenDay" part doesn't seem to be returning anything. Here's what's in the HTML:

Code: Select all

<img src="http://forecast.weather.gov/" class="nwsForecastIconImg">

Edit: Well, the block's change log shows the last update in early 2018, so that may be the rest of the problem.

Edit 2: The current block operates by scraping HTML downloaded from https://forecast.weather.gov. I don't know if it was available in early 2018 when the block was last updated, but NWS now has an API:
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

A query to https://api.weather.gov/points/(lat),(long) will return a JSON object including (among other things) a URI for the 7-day forecast; a query to that URI will return the entire forecast, again as a JSON object. All the data currently displayed by the block is there, including HTTPS URLs to the icons. Seems it ought to be pretty straightforward to use this for the block rather than the HTML scrape, but that's easy for me to say.

[danb35]

ChatGPT came up with this as code to retrieve and parse the NWS API:

Code: Select all

// Fetch grid and forecast URL from NWS API
$pointsUrl = "https://api.weather.gov/points/{$lat},{$lon}";
$ch = curl_init($pointsUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MyWeatherApp (youremail@example.com)"); // required by NWS
$pointsResponse = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($pointsResponse === false) {
    die("Error retrieving point data");
}

$pointsData = json_decode($pointsResponse, true);
if (!isset($pointsData['properties']['forecast'])) {
    die("No forecast URL found for this location");
}

$forecastUrl = $pointsData['properties']['forecast'];

// Now fetch the forecast itself
$ch = curl_init($forecastUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MyWeatherApp (youremail@example.com)");
$forecastResponse = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($forecastResponse === false) {
    die("Error retrieving forecast data");
}

$forecastData = json_decode($forecastResponse, true);
if (!isset($forecastData['properties']['periods'])) {
    die("No forecast periods found");
}

$periods = $forecastData['properties']['periods'];
$data = [];

// Build the $data array to match your existing structure
foreach ($periods as $period) {
    $data[] = [
        'time'        => $period['name'],
        'temp'        => $period['temperature'] . ' ' . $period['temperatureUnit'],
        'forecast'    => $period['shortForecast'],
        'wind'        => $period['windDirection'] . ' ' . $period['windSpeed'],
        'detailed'    => $period['detailedForecast']
    ];
}

It's going to take some work yet to integrate it into the rest of the block though.

[danb35]

Almost have it:

Screenshot 2025-10-10 at 06.48.33.png (143.28 KiB) Viewed 6923 times

Just need to work a little more on parsing that valid date range.

[danb35]

All right, done, at least as far as I can tell. The updated block is here:
https://github.com/danb35/MTBlocks/tree ... wsForecast

[Gus]

Updated NWS forecast block working well.
Thank you