Wrong Code received from Yahoo

[pedronoliveira]

Hi all

Great work with the script.
Unfortunately, I don't know why (been doing some testing my self) but there is a small problem with my location/code retriving from yahoo/ day time.

Meaning when I use your script I get a code for the night, and get the statement for day.

Using this combo:
'+weather.code+' - '+weather.timeOfDay+

I get a code for the night (lets say 27) and the time of Day returns as 'd'.

I honesty don't know where the problem comes from. I suppose it can be a problem related with this line:

var weatherUrl = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?format=json&rnd='+now.getFullYear()+now.getMonth()+now.getDay()+now.getHours()+'&diagnostics=true&callback=?&diagnostics=true&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys&q=';

Most particularly with this piece of code:

+now.getFullYear()+now.getMonth()+now.getDay()+now.getHours()+

[fleeting]

Currently weather.timeOfDay doesn't work very well. It uses new Date() to compare to sunrise and sunset times reported by Yahoo which means it compares the time of the user visiting the site with those times and doesn't reflect whether it is day or night in the city it is reporting. I haven't tested it yet but an alternative would be to use the last updated time reported in the feed from Yahoo and compare it but I would have to convert it, etc. I'm not really sure what will end up being the best solution. I'll play around with a few things this weekend and see. I don't want to remove the timeOfDay but it needs to function correctly first.

[pedronoliveira]

Instead of using the new Date() to do the comparison I'm trying it with moment.js script, but so far noluck.
For reference http://momentjs.com/

[fleeting]

It can be done using moment.js. It's one of the options I've looked at however it would mean including moment.js with simpleWeather or making it a requirement. This should get you the correct time of day using the last updated date/time that Yahoo reports (which is the date/time that the weather was reported, so still won't be 100% accurate as if Yahoo reported the weather at 6:01pm but sunset is 6:02pm then Yahoo may not update the weather for 10+mins so the script would still say daytime until the next time Yahoo pushes a new weather report). This compares that last updated with a timestamp for sunrise and sunset using moment.js. http://cdpn.io/c/Eiejv The lines are 14-20 that gives you a more accurate time of day.

Let me know if that works for you.

[pedronoliveira]

fleeting, please check this, http://codepen.io/pedronoliveira/pen/Lneya I think it's more easy to explain my self this way. Thank for your patience and help!

[fleeting]

I see the weather for Boa Vista with a weather code of 11 and nighttime. Looking at the feed for that location it looks like the last updated is 5:00pm but sunset is 5:47pm so it should be showing daytime for another 47mins. Let me test a little more with that location now. I tested a handful of other locations and they worked with the moment.js pen I did above. I'll see what I can do.

[Pennstater]

I am following this with interest as I had the same question as you, pedronoliveira (regarding the calculation of day versus night). Is the Boa Vista you are referencing this --> Boa Vista - Roraima, Brazil? According to a quick Google search for the current time, it is 3:19 PM, however your code pen shows NIGHTTIME, and James mentions nighttime in his most recent post.

I was doing some Googling on this earlier and came across the following: https://drupal.org/node/660364. It was written for Drupal (PHP), so I'm not sure how well that translates to JS, but perhaps the algorithm could be of use.

[fleeting]

@Pennstater the location he is using is for this http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/POXX0058_c.html which at the time was shortly before sunset according to what Yahoo was returning.

I'll take a look at the Drupal link. However, it would be fairly easy to do this in PHP because it has much better date/time handling than JavaScript does by default.

I just want to clarify that using weather.timeOfDay will return an inaccurate value all the time. That uses JS to get the current date/time for the user visiting the site to determine if it is daytime or nighttime. That is where the issue is. If I visit his codepen link for Boa Vista it shows D with weather.timeOfDay because it is daytime here (1:50pm) and doesn't take into account the actual location. The "nighttime" text is using moment.js to convert the dates and times to compare them. I'm going to test a few things further.

[fleeting]

I typed all this out and then had time to work on a core fix for this not using moment.js. I'm in the middle of testing it now and will post the fix if I get it working. To get it working with moment.js use the below but a core fix is coming.

---

@pedronoliveira I made a tweak to the moment.js code in my first pen. Here is the updated version: http://codepen.io/fleeting/pen/Eiejv In the version before the if statement was failing due to an invalid date. It now specifies the format of the date I'm passing to moment.js which should give an accurate result of whether it is daytime or nighttime now. Again it is line 14 through line 21. That piece of code would replace you using weather.timeOfDay. What might be more helpful for you depending on how you are using timeOfDay would be to set a variable like the example below. (you will need to include moment.js before the simpleWeather() call)

updatedTime = moment(weather.updated, 'ddd, D MMM YYYY h:mm A z').format('X');
if(updatedTime > moment(weather.sunrise, 'h:mm A').format('X') && updatedTime < moment(weather.sunset, 'h:mm A').format('X')) {
    var timeOfDay = 'd';
} else {
    var timeOfDay = 'n';
}

Then you can use timeOfDay however you need for a more accurate result. Let me know if that doesn't work for you.

[Pennstater]

@fleeting Looking forward to seeing the "core" fix.

Just thinking out loud here... I also spent some time looking for REST/JSON web services to return the current time of a location. Google has one, but there are restrictions (2,500 requests/24 hours and it is tied to a personal Google account). I also found this, which looked promising: http://www.geonames.org/ and http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#timezone, but you also have to register your page through them (not sure how often you could make a call to their service using the username of "demo"). I liked this because it gave you the actual time (in their example link, of Austria) at the moment of the request of the city of interest along with the sunrise and sunset, so you are not limited to the last time Yahoo updated their weather data. For me, I have a distinct, finite list of cities to which I make available to users from which they can select for display on their personalized homepage (up to five). In this list (array of city elements), I have the WOEID, but I could easily add the longitude and latitude to these elements then use that to get the current time from GeoNames to accurately determine whether it is day time or night time.

Thanks for all your doing on this!!!

[fleeting]

Using a third party solution or library might be the best way to go with this issue. I ran into a few issues with the fix I'm working on in that Yahoo returns a timezone abbr instead of the numerical value which is required for timezone in JavaScript Date(). I can get it working for North America but not other areas. Speaking of timezone that brings an issue into the moment.js solution above that also can't be fixed because moment.js removed support for timezone abbr in v1.6 due to unexpected results when dealing with timezones.

I don't want to require another dependency or bundle another library with simpleWeather just for time of day so I think this will be removed and leave it up to the developer on how they want to get the current time for a location either using something like the resources @Pennstater listed above. If anybody has any suggestions that I'm missing using vanilla JavaScript then I'm open to any ideas. Currently I don't think there is a solution using vanilla JS or maybe I've been playing with it for too long.

[Pennstater]

Yeah - it's tough keeping your plugin "simple", without requiring other libraries and such. One other thought I had (and this is where it gets into the individual developer creating their own solution) is to again extend the array of cities I am using and add in timezone offsets (+9.50 UTC, -5.00 UTC, etc), which can then be used to calculate the city's time based on the user's location (using new Date() and the UTC methods that come with it). From that value, we can compare against the sunrise and sunset times. Again, doing this is not a "generic" solution that can be used by everyone using Simple Weather - it is developer specific (and I'm thinking out loud here again - not sure if this would work).

@fleeting Thank you again for looking into this and being so responsive.

[fleeting]

@Pennstater Exactly. I was just about to come back and post that. If you know what cities you are displaying for then you can set your timezone offsets and get exactly what is needed. So if you are working with only one city or a list that you control and not done by user input then it might be the best solution per developer. I may whip up a demo and blog post on doing that over the next few days. The main issue comes with the date/time I get from Yahoo uses the timezone abbr (ex: CST) instead of the offset and JavaScript doesn't have a built-in way to convert that besides only North America locations (see http://stackoverflow.com/a/17977431). I think your per developer solution is the best option and I'll make mention of it in the docs when I get demo done.

Thanks @Pennstater and @pedronoliveira for bringing this issue up and @defvayne23 for helping me walk through some options. I knew it was there but I had never used timeOfDay in a project I used simpleWeather so never ran into the issue personally. That being said, I am looking at other weather API's and am considering switching away from Yahoo and using a different one. I haven't picked one but have been testing and looking at a few so I'll keep this issue in mind as I research them so maybe we can avoid this later. I'm not sure when or if I'll get a new API hooked in. The one Yahoo provides is extremely easy to use and great data returned but there are some minor things that I wish they would return better or more data.

[pedronoliveira]

@fleeting @Pennstater thank you for all your help, right now I'm using the moment.js trick, and I think that for now it's working pretty good.

Basically I was using the weather.timeOfDay, to get the code that would generate the image for the state of the weather, it was more practical that way, but other than that I just have to use a var to select the icon instead of the returned code of Yahoo itself.

I agree with @fleeting with the problem of Yahoo weather services, so in my free time I'll try to look into other weather API and try to adapt it to simpleWeather.

Once again thank you for your time and patience!

[fleeting]

@pedronoliveira If you come across a worthy weather API let me know. I have a version of simpleWeather using http://openweathermap.org/ locally that I've been testing; it has some great data and returns all date/time as unixtime GMT. I need to finish messing with it and looking at some others to see what the best choice to go with is. Some example data is http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?q=Austin,TX for forecast and http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=Austin,TX for current conditions.