Thread: Share Price monitor program

Hi there. I haven't been hear in a while. I was hoping that someone maybe able to help me. I wanted to write a program which was able to get certain share prices off yahoo finance, and then save things like the open price, close price, change etc in a file.

One way I have thought about doing it, is to 'hardwire' all the symbols of the companies I want to monitor into an array, and then just make it go to http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=??? where the ??? at the end is the code of the company from the array. It would then have to look at the source code for things like the open price etc, and then just have to save them to a file. The saving to a file bit isn't the problem, its more the getting the program to connect to the internet, go to the site, and search the source code, so most of it lol.

In the past, I've normally programmed in C++, but I want to do this in C, to make it that much harder ;p

Using a library like libcurl will make it a lot easier.

Unless you're deliberately wanting to implement part of an HTML client using the socket level API.

Also, be aware that someone else found a stumbling block in that the code to actually present the data is "hidden" inside a java-script. So when you fetch the HTML, you don't actually get the share data, only the links and static graphics around it.

I haven't looked at the Yahoo site, so I can't say if they do this or not. But before you write a lot of code, try having a look at the "HTML source" of the page, and see if you find the actual data you'd like to scrape out of there - if not, you may need to do quite a bit more than just fetch the HTML and clean it up to get the data out of there.

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Mats