Error message when getting online price quotes

[John Ralls]

On Mar 6, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Anna Scott <anna at poplarhouse.net> wrote:

> Hi John, I have turned off online quotes for all my funds and securities except my IBM stock. I have not changed any of the set-up for this stock at all. When I run the 'get online quotes', it now says it can't find quotes for the commodity 'IBM. It is set up to get the price from yahoo USA. If I turn on online quotes for one of my UK stocks, set up to get the price from Yahoo Europe, I get the original 'unknown error' message back again. If I change the IBM stock to get the price from elsewhere such as Motley Fool, I get the 'unkown error' message. All very odd. 
> 

That sure sounds like you still have a version of F::Q before 1.20, so I tried it on my Win7 VM. I found that 1) Strawberry Perl 5.12 is too old to successfully update to the latest version of F::Q and 2) Strawberry Perl doesn’t do a very good job of installing over an existing installation. I was able to work around the former by running cpan from the command line and installing a new version of Modules::Build, but I suspect that’s beyond the reach of most users, so I took a different tack. This worked:

In Control Panel>Programs and Features, find Strawberry Perl and uninstall it.
>From Windows Explorer, delete the folder C:\strawberry
Run Install Online Quotes.

That built everything cleanly and yahoo quotes now work. Fool seems broken: The URL in Fool.pm, 'http://quote.fool.com/quotes.csv?symbols=', redirects to their “CAPS” community touting page. Can’t say for your UK stocks.

Regards,
John Ralls