weather-cn_skill

Overview

This skill provides a lightweight Chinese weather query tool that scrapes China Weather Network (weather.com.cn) and returns formatted weather and life-index information in Chinese. It uses a pure shell-script approach (bash + curl + grep/sed) with no large-model dependency and zero per-query token cost. The tool is fast, reliable, and suitable for automation or interactive use.

How this skill works

The main script looks up a city code from a local mapping file, fetches the city weather page with curl, and extracts relevant HTML fragments using grep/sed. Parsed data is formatted into a readable, colored text block showing current conditions, temperatures, and life indexes. Adding new cities is done by appending entries to the city-code file with the code found in the China Weather Network URL.

When to use it

• Quick one-off weather checks for Chinese cities without using APIs
• Automated scripts, cron jobs, or CI tasks that need weather info with minimal overhead
• Terminal-first workflows where JSON or API keys are undesirable
• Low-cost or offline-friendly environments where token usage must be zero
• Situations that require raw source data from weather.com.cn rather than third-party aggregators

Best practices

• Keep weather_codes.txt updated; obtain codes from the city page URL on weather.com.cn
• Use standard city names (e.g., "Chengdu", "Beijing") as mapped in the codes file
• Wrap the script call in aliases or small wrapper functions for easier daily use
• Handle network failures gracefully in calling code (retry/backoff) since the scraper depends on site availability
• Validate and sanitize any new city code entries to avoid parsing errors

Example use cases

• Interactive terminal query: ./weather-cn.sh 成都 to get current conditions and life indexes
• Scheduled job that logs daily city weather summaries for dashboards or reports
• Lightweight home automation: trigger actions (e.g., close windows) when precipitation is detected
• CI/test environments needing deterministic, low-cost weather lookups without external APIs
• Local tools for Chinese-language displays or status boards that prefer native formatting