I’ve been looking for options for a stock ticker for an intranet page we’re developing here and the current feed that’s available to us right now is very limiting—we’re basically forced to accept a feed with certain dimensions, color scheme and a nasty “logo” to boot.

So my first reaction… “AGH, there’s gotta be someone out there doing an XML/RSS type of stock info feed out there”.

I found a posting on someone’s blog about how they’ve developed an XML result by simply querying Yahoo. While the gentleman didn’t share his code with the world, I thought I would at least share the URL string to use when querying Yahoo. Insert the ticker symbol where it’s noted in bold:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=UNH&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv

With the above example, here is what is contained in the .csv file that it dynamically gives me:

“UNH”,51.87,”7/12/2005″,”2:40pm”,-0.56,52.53,52.90,51.75,4787200

a simple comma-delimited file with important stock information. It provides (in this order) symbol, last trade amount, day of last trade, time of last trade, change (plus or minus), opening value, day’s high, day’s low, and what I presume to be volume.

My next goal is to see how I can take that information and make my own xml file and/or parse it with flash to create a stock ticker that’s a bit more flexible to work with.

Anyway, thought I’d pass on that tidbit of information.

July 12, 2005, 3:00 pm

Filed under: Actionscript, JavaScript, PHP, XML / XHTML

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