Finance Quote TIAA/CREF module broken again

[DAVID REISER]

On Sep 22, 2012, at 3:08 PM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> --On September 22, 2012 10:43:30 AM -0700 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
>> Yup. So the new Tiaacref.pm is defective, at least for Gnucash's
>> needs. That should probably go on the FQ bug report.
> 
> No it's not, it works fine for me.  Has anyone else been able to make it work?
> 
> The previous message from davelist included:
> 
> $ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-helper tiaacref symbol
> Can't open tiaacref: No such file or directory at /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-helper line 344.
> Can't open symbo: No such file or directory at /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-helper line 344.
> 
> This implies to me that there is something wrong with the Tiaacref.pm file that makes perl unable to open it.  Perhaps it's a line ending thing.  Did you do something that converted the line endings of the file?  It should have Unix line endings.  If it ended up with Windows or Mac line endings, it probably won't work.  This is just a guess, there could be any number of other things wrong with the file.
> 
>          Mike
> _______________________________________________

It looks to me like TIAA-CREF is sending unicode, and f-q or gnucash is choking on that.


[14:29:20] dbr at DOPL6: Auto $gnc-fq-dump -v tiaacref CREFstok
Finance::Quote fields Gnucash uses:
    symbol: CREFstok (deduced)   <=== required
      date: ** missing **        <=== required
  currency: ** missing **        <=== required
      last:                      <=\       
       nav:                      <=== one of these
     price:                      <=/        
  timezone:                      <=== optional

** This stock quote cannot be used by gnucash!!


All fields returned by Finance::Quote for stock CREFstok

stock           field  value
-----           -----  -----
CREFstok     errormsg: No data returned
CREFstok         last: **missing**
CREFstok          nav: **missing**
CREFstok        price: **missing**
CREFstok      success: 0

If I construct the URL and analyze what comes back, I see an extra NUL character after each normal ascii character. Line endings are just LF+NUL. The manual URL I used was:

https://www.tiaa-cref.org/public/tcfpi/Export/InvestmentDetails?Details=DailyPerformance&NavStart=2012-09-15&NavEnd=2012-09-22&WSODIssues=41081995&viewtype=CSV


I'm using a fink build of gnucash 2.4.11 on Mac OS X 10.8.2
Dave

--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at me.com