Homeland Security Advisory System

Back in 2002, a bunch of bureaucrats decided that the United States needed an advisory system so that all federal departments and agencies could communicate what the current threat condition was using the same definitions. Sounds like a good idea to me.

The average citizen can see what the current threat condition is by visiting certain government web sites. The web site for the Department of Homeland Security is a good example.

The Department of Homeland Security also provides a little-known web service which returns the threat condition in XML format so that you can do what you want with it. Let's write a function to retrieve and parse this information down to just the threat condition itself.

ASP

1. function getThreatLevel()


2.     dim regEx


3.     set regEx = new RegExp




5.     with regEx


6.         .Pattern = ".*\n.*CONDITION=""(.*)"" />"


7.         .IgnoreCase = true


8.         .Global = true


9.     end with




11.     dim xmlhttp


12.     set xmlhttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")


13.     xmlhttp.open "GET", "http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition", "False"


14.     xmlhttp.send




16.     getThreatLevel = regEx.replace(xmlhttp.responseText, "$1")




18.     set xmlhttp = nothing


19.     set regEx = nothing


20. end function

As is often the case, the PHP version requires a significantly less amount of code.

PHP

1. function getThreatLevel()


2. {


3.     return eregi_replace('.*CONDITION="(.*)" />', '\1', file_get_contents("http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition"));


4. }

So now we have a string that contains just the word "ELEVATED" (or whatever the current threat level is at the moment; it's been at elevated for several years at the time of this writing). What can you do with it? Feed it into a switch statement and display an image is one possibility.

• View ASP implementation on Snipplr
• View PHP implementation on Snipplr