A fix for “failed to open stream” w/WeatherIcon 2.0

With new WP, there’s a built-in function to retrieve a given URI. My quick fix was to use that, as it will use fopen if available, else use curl.

look for the lines:

$host = 'weather.noaa.gov';
$location = "/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/$station.TXT";

You’ll be replacing all the code AFTER those two variables, all the way down to (but not including):

if ($fp = fopen($metar_cache, "w"))
{
fwrite($fp, $metar);
fclose($fp);
}


The new, replacement quick hack retrieval code I used is:

$metar = wp_remote_fopen('https://'.$host.$location);
$offset = strpos($metar, $station); // better be!
if ($offset===FALSE) $metar = false;
else $metar = substr($metar, $offset);


Seems to be working well for me so far at home, though my host still doesn’t like curl any better than fopen/fsockopen.

THIS IS A HACK. YMMV. If you aren’t having problems, I’d wait until it can be tested further and rolled into a ‘proper’ bulletproof solution in a main release…