best way to parse data from webpage

You can automatically get stock prices using a script similar to one below. This script is written in biterscripting. It downloads a stock's price from finance.yahoo.com.

# [B]SCRIPT: Price.txt[/B]
# Input argument.
var string symbol
 
# Get the first table from finance.yahoo.com for the stock symbol.
var string URL, table
set $URL = "http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s="+$symbol
script ss_webpagetocsv.txt page($URL) number(1) > $table
 
# Get the first row.
var string row ; lex "1" $table > $row
# Get the first column.
var string column ; wex "1" $row > $column
# $column now has stock price in string format. Convert it to real.
var real price ; set $price = makereal(str($column))
 
# Print price. Or insert into DB or excel.
echo $price

Store the script in C:\Scripts\Price.txt. Call it from biterscripting as follows.

script Price.txt symbol("<your stock symbol here>")

If you want to load the prices into DB instead, insert an sql statement in the above script. You can do this for multiple stock prices by writing a script that calls the above Price script once per stock symbol. Also, you can schedule this activity daily/hourly/etc. using task scheduler or cron.

As far biterscripting ( http://www.biterscripting.com/install.html ), it is just a general scripting language. It has nothing to do with stock prices. You can use any scripting language. Just code the above functionality in the scripting language of your choice.

Randi

(Make sure any site you use to download prices from, that it is ok with them to download prices using such batch approach.)