My last post talked about finding MATLAB code from other people so that you do not have to reinvent it yourself. Eric, the author of the code I modified, challenged me to create “a new Matlab Central submission that uses the thermometer and a urlread of boston.com to make a new chart like that every day.”

I am not one to back away from a challenge, so here it is.

The code is fragile, but basically I am using URLREAD to bring in data from http://www.boston.com/weather/. Once I have the data, I use regular expressions to bring in the data I want. I basically came up with the regular expression by finding the html surrounding the data I was interested in. From there I captured my tokens.

The rest was just calling the modified thermometer.m code from last week.

I say this is fragile because it is relying on the website keeping the same format. If they change much of anything, this will break. However, until that happens, this is a nice little visualization that shows how you can make just about anything into a datafeed. Are there websites, internal or otherwise, that you would like to have MATLAB read from?

Blog readership goes down significantly over the winter holidays, so I will be taking a week off. I will talk to you all again after the turn of the New Year.