Pythons Project for beginners - Post 26: Simple Weather App
- Anubhav Somani
- Sep 6
- 2 min read
Let's build a Simple Weather App. This project is a fantastic next step because it introduces you to working with external APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and handling data in the common JSON format.
First, here is the explanation of how the project is built.
How the "Simple Weather App" is Made
The Core Idea: The goal is to create a command-line program that fetches and displays the current weather for any city the user enters. This project is a great introduction to working with APIs, which is how different programs share data over the internet.
Required Modules: This project requires the requests library to make HTTP requests. This is not a built-in library, so you may need to install it first by running pip install requests in your terminal.
Finding a Free Weather API: We'll use a simple and free weather service called wttr.in. It's great for beginners because it doesn't require an API key. By formatting a URL correctly (e.g., https://wttr.in/London?format=j1), we can get a clean JSON data response with weather information.
The Core Logic:
Get User Input: The program starts by asking the user for a city name.
Make the API Request: It constructs the correct URL with the user's city and uses requests.get() to fetch the data. This is wrapped in a try-except block to handle potential network errors.
Check the Response: After getting a response, we check its status_code. A status code of 200 means everything was successful. Any other code might indicate an error (like the city not being found).
Parse JSON Data: The API sends back data in a format called JSON. The requests library has a built-in .json() method that automatically converts this data into a Python dictionary, making it easy to work with.
Extract and Display Information: Once we have the data as a dictionary, we can access the weather details (like temperature, wind speed, and description) by looking up the correct keys. We then print this information in a clear, human-readable format.
Putting it all Together in a Function: The entire process is wrapped in a main function. This function guides the user, makes the API call, processes the data, and handles any errors that might occur, such as a network failure or an invalid city name.
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