A couple of months ago one of my readers asked me to build a stock quote class that
would automatically update the quote. I forgot about it, but then I found the e-mail
and decided to give it a go. I started looking for some free services that could provide
the data in XML format or something similar that can be easy parsed. Apparently that
does not exist. All the stock sites charge you for that information and I want something
free, so that was not the way to go.
Then I read about the Yahoo financial
website and that it could be screen scraped fairly easy, so that’s what the class
will use. The class is actually very simple to both use and modify. If the class isn't
exactly what you need, you can just use its screen scraping methods to create
your own implementation.
Update:
I've got some comments pointing out that Yahoo can give you CSV files, so I took a
look at it, and now it does not use screen scraping any more. Thanks for the comments.
Examples of use
To get the quote for a specific stock, you can call the static Execute method. In
this example a text box is filled with the quote:
txtStockQuote.Text
= StockEngine.Execute("MSFT").Value.ToString();
You can also hook into the automatic update event, so that you can update a text box
every time an update occurs. By default it is every minute.
private StockEngine _Engine;
private void PrepareStockQuote()
{
_Engine
= new StockEngine("MSFT");
_Engine.AutoUpdate
= true;
_Engine.UpdateInterval
= 60000; // 1 minute
_Engine.Updated
+= new EventHandler<EventArgs>(_Engine_Updated);
}
private void _Engine_Updated(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
txtStockQuote.Text
= _Engine.Value.ToString();
}
Download
StockEngine.zip
(1,92 KB)
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