# Weather - a simple tool to look up weather forecasts Weather is far faster than any browser based forecast request; the weather websites nowadays are so full of surveillance that each forecast takes around 650KB for Met Office or 8MB for BBC. Much better to just make a single request for the forecast data in JSON format and display it, which is what this tool does. Weather currently requires a location ID for the location to look up. The defaults are hardcoded at the top of weather.go (bbcdefid and metdefid), and I encourage you to set them to your own home location. Otherwise, you can set the location ID with an argument to the program. ## Finding your location ID The Met Office and BBC weather providers each use different IDs, but each are easy to discover. For the BBC, go to the forecast page for your location and the ID is the final part of the page URL, for example 2653266 is the location ID for Chelmsford, which has this page on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.com/weather/2653266. You could also look it up with their JSON location service, using the 'containerId' field from a request like this: https://open.live.bbc.co.uk/locator/locations?s=chelmsford&format=json For the Met Office, look up your location and use the ID from the 'nearestSspaId' field from this URL, substituting "Chelmsford" for the location you want: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/plain-rest-services/location-search/Chelmsford/?max=5 ## Notes Weather doesn't use any API keys or anything silly like that, instead relying on the URLs the organisations use with their own Javascript. The Met Office unfortunately forbids requests through tor, but BBC allow them.