NAME
Finance::YahooQuote - Get stock quotes from Yahoo! Finance
SYNOPSIS
use Finance::YahooQuote;
# setting TIMEOUT and PROXY is optional
$Finance::YahooQuote::TIMEOUT = 60;
$Finance::YahooQuote::PROXY = "http://some.where.net:8080";
@quote = getonequote $symbol; # Get a quote for a single symbol
@quotes = getquote @symbols; # Get quotes for a bunch of symbolsDESCRIPTION
This module gets stock quotes from Yahoo! Finance. The getonequote function will return a quote for a single stock symbol, while the getquote function will return a quote for each of the stock symbols passed to it. The download operation is efficient: only one request is made even if several symbols are requested at once. The return value of getonequote is an array, with the following elements:
0 Symbol
1 Company Name
2 Last Price
3 Last Trade Date
4 Last Trade Time
5 Change
6 Percent Change
7 Volume
8 Average Daily Vol
9 Bid
10 Ask
11 Previous Close
12 Today's Open
13 Day's Range
14 52-Week Range
15 Earnings per Share
16 P/E Ratio
17 Dividend Pay Date
18 Dividend per Share
19 Dividend Yield
20 Market Capitalization
21 Stock ExchangeThe getquote function returns an array of pointers to arrays with the above structure.
Beyond stock quotes, Finance::YahooQuote can also obtain quotes for currencies (from the Philadephia exchange), US mutual funds, options on US stocks, several precious metals and quite possibly more; see the Yahoo! Finance website for full information. Finance::YahooQuote can be used for stocks from the USA, Canada, various European exchanges, various Asian exchanges (Singapore, Taiwan, HongKong, Kuala Lumpur, ...) Australia and New Zealand. It should work for other markets supported by Yahoo.
You may optionally override the default LWP timeout of 180 seconds by setting $Finance::YahooQuote::TIMEOUT to your preferred value.
You may also provide a proxy (for the required http connection) by using the variable $Finance::YahooQuote::PROXY. Furthermore, authentication-based proxies can be used by setting the proxy user and password via the variables $Finance::YahooQuote::PROXYUSER and $Finance::YahooQuote::PROXYPASSWD.
Two example scripts are provided to help with the mapping a stock symbols as well as with Yahoo! Finance server codes.
FAQs
How can one figure out the format string?
Provided a My Yahoo! (http://my.yahoo.com) account, go to the following URL:
http://edit.my.yahoo.com/config/edit_pfview?.vk=v1Viewing the source of this page, you will come across the section that defines the menus that let you select which elements go into a particular view. The <option> values are the strings that pick up the information described in the menu item. For example, Symbol refers to the string "s" and name refers to the string "l". Using "sl" as the format string, we would get the symbol followed by the name of the security.
The example script examine_server.sh shows this in some more detail and downloads example .csv files using GNU wget.
What about different stock symbols for the same corporation?
This can be issue. For the first few years, Yahoo! Finance's servers appeared to be cover their respective local markets. E.g., the UK-based servers provided quotes for Europe, the Australian one for the Australia and New Zealand and so on. Hence, one needed to branch and bound code and map symbols to their region's servers.
It now appears that this is no longer required, which is good news as it simplifies coding. However, some old symbols are no longer supported -- yet other, and supported, codes exist for the same company. For example, German stocks used to quoted in terms or their cusip-like 'WKN'. The main server does not support these, but does support newer, acronym-based symbols. The example script examine_server.sh helps in finding the mapping as e.g. from 555750.F to DTEGN.F for Deutsche Telekom.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Dj Padzensky Copyright 2002 Dirk Eddelbuettel
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The information that you obtain with this library may be copyrighted by Yahoo! Inc., and is governed by their usage license. See http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/gen_disclaimer.html for more information.
AUTHOR
Dj Padzensky (djpadz@padz.net), PadzNet, Inc., wrote the original version. Dirk Eddelbuettel (edd@debian.org) provided some extensions.
SEE ALSO
The Finance::YahooQuote home pages are found at http://www.padz.net/~djpadz/YahooQuote/ and http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/yahooquote.html.
The smtm (Show Me The Money) program uses Finance::YahooQuote for a customisable stock/portfolio ticker and chart display, see http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/smtm.html for more. The beancounter program uses it to store quotes in a SQL database, see http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/beancounter.html.