Pull down all data from nhc website as a JSON dump

hurricanes.py

#  Pulls down national Hurricane Centre data.
#
#  Data are located in zipfiles. Each zipfile contains one or more shapfiles. 
#  A shapfile is really a collection of files, I'm interested in the .dbf file as 
#  this contains the tabular data as well as columns with geographic information.
#  If the .dbf file did not have the location data in the table I would have to use
#  a library like shapely or fiona to get the geographic data
#

import os
import re
import requests
import zipfile
from dbfread import DBF
from io import BytesIO
from json import dumps

url = 'http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis/forecast/archive/'

data = requests.get(url)

with open('data.json','w') as outfile:
    for line in data.iter_lines():
        zipline = re.search('"[al|ep].+zip"',line)
        if zipline:
            if 'latest' not in zipline.group():
                zipurl = zipline.group().strip('"')
                print zipurl
                zipreq = requests.get(url+zipurl)
                with zipfile.ZipFile(BytesIO(zipreq.content)) as zipp:
                    items = zipp.infolist()
                    item = [item.filename for item in items if item.filename[-7:] == 'pts.dbf']
                    if len(item) == 0:
                        continue
                    zipp.extract(item[0])
                    for row in DBF(item[0]):
                        row['nhc_filename'] = zipurl[:-4]
                        outfile.writelines(dumps(row) + '\n')
                    os.remove(item[0])
                print item