Parses a parameterlist.htm file and creates a dictionary(hash table) with the data.

parse_weather.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# We open the file and create the handle 'f' to access the content.
f = open("parameterlist.htm", 'r')

# The variable 'lines' now has all the lines of the file. 'lines' is an array.
lines = f.readlines()

# We initialise a hash table (dictionary) that we will put the parsed parameters in.
# At the end, we can access the variables as in  
#     parameters['monthtodateavgtemp']
parameters = {}

# We go through every line in the 'lines' array and extract the parameters.
for l in lines:
	# Every lines ends with <br>. We remove that '<br>'.
	# l[:-5] means that we ignore the last 5 characters of the line.
        # '<br>^M' is five characters, ^M is a single character for newline.
	proper_line = l[:-5]
	
	# If the line is empty, go up and try the next line.
	if proper_line.__len__() == 0:
		continue

	# If the line starts with '#' (comment), we ignore as well.
	# The very first line of the file starts with a special character
	# so we ignore as well.
	if proper_line[0] == '#' or proper_line[0] == '\xef':
		continue

	# We extract the variable name and value, by spliting the string
	# 'items' is an array, items[0] is variable name, items[1] is value.
	items = proper_line.split('=', 2)

	# Uncomment this if you want to see each line being printed.
	#print items

 	# Some lines, like 'genExtraHumidity20', have no value, so the 
	# spliting above only produces the name (items[0]) and no items[1]
	# With the following code we handle both cases. 
	try:
		# The most common case that works all the time
		# If items[1] is not defined, Python will run instead the
		# version that is located under the 'except IndexError' line.
		parameters[items[0]] = items[1]
	except IndexError:
		# In the case there is no value, we add an empty value.
		parameters[items[0]] = ''

for variable, value in parameters.items():
	print "The variable:", variable, "and the value is:", value

print
print "For example, the MonthToDataAVGTemp is", parameters['monthtodateavgtemp']

f.close()