metaf2xml For Linux

metaf2xml is an open source, multiplatform and free command-line software that can be used to decode and parse aerodrome forecasts (TAF), aviation routine weather reports (METAR, SPECI), observations from buoys (BUOY), as well as synoptic observations (SYNOP).

All parts of the messages are parsed by the metaf2xml software, some common format errors are corrected or tolerated, and the extracted data will be written automatically to the XML file format or passed to a user-defined function (all done in Perl).

metaf2xml also provides XSLT style sheets, which can be used to convert XML to text, HTML or XML with different schemas, and a web-based user interface that can be used to display and download up-to-date weather data from Ogimet, NOAA, and other sources.

The software requires no installation and can be used directly from the source package, after downloading it from Softpedia or the project’s website, saving it on your Home folder, and uncompressed it with your favorite archive manager utility. Being a command-line tool, metaf2xml requires you to use a terminal emulator app to interact with it. Please read the README file found on the source package for more details on how to use the software.

Being designed from the ground up to be a multi-platform application, metaf2xml is currently supported on any distribution of GNU/Linux, as well as on the BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows computer operating systems.

Looking under the hood of the metaf2xml project, we can notice that while it is written in the Perl programming language, it’s independent of a hardware platform, thus supported on 32 and 64-bit machines. The XSL (XPath/XSL-FO/XSLT) programming languages were also used in metaf2xml.