; example of using some weather station data in a hash url = 'http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/stations.txt' neturl = obj_new('IDLnetUrl') data = neturl->get(url=url, /string_array) data = [data, ''] ; add extra blank line to make processing easier elevations = hash() blanks = where(data eq '', count) for b = 0L, count - 1L do begin line_number = blanks[b] + 3L ; skip blank line, name of state, and header while (line_number lt (n_elements(data) - 1L) && line_number lt blanks[b + 1]) do begin line = data[line_number] station = strmid(line, 26, 3) elevation = strmid(line, 55, 4) if (strtrim(station, 2) ne '' && strtrim(elevation, 2) ne '') then begin help, station, elevation elevations[station] = long(elevation) endif line_number++ endwhile endfor end