gnucash-user Digest, Vol 135, Issue 17

[Glenn Bergmann]

Every day I use Portfolio Management software to automatically download
yesterday's closing price for about 20 stocks and mutual funds.  The source
for the closing price is finance.yahoo.com.  I have selected yahoo for the
gnuCash price source.

I am very familiar with their historical prices in a .csv file.  I use 7
years historical data for technical analysis.  So far I have had no
problems with yahoo changing the format.  It has been a .csv file for quite
some time.

I just upgraded to gnuCash version 2.6.3.  Same problem as before, the
prices for my stocks and mutual funds are not available.  I am using the
same Perl module that used to work OK.

Glenn


On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Maf. King <maf at chilwell.net> wrote:

> On Wed 18 June 14 14:49:59 Glenn Bergmann wrote:
> > I am using Windows 7 and gnuCash version 2.4.13.  I use
> finance.yahoo.com
> > very frequently for information.  I don't understand "scraping the
> screens"
> > and the update to "access the new website screens" procedures.  Could you
> > send me the link to find them?
> >
>
> Hi Glenn,
>
> "Screen Scraping" is a term which means that the software downloads the
> webpage designed for a human to read (HTML file) and looks for a certain
> pattern to grab the required information from.
>
> If the website layout or wording change, then the "screen scraper" program
> can't find the target information.  Hence the module must be updated to
> match
> the new HTML layout.  Of course, these changes usually happen to websites
> without any warning, so it is only when a user posts to a list "my quotes
> stopped working" that the changes and update can be published.
>
> HTH,
> Maf.
>
>