Snippet to grab historical data for stocks

jadams (Josh Adams) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:46:21 GMT

This is a quick little snippet I'm whipping up to import some historical data in for a graphing app we're building for stock data. I figured I'd post this snippet before I maul it into something application-specific...

It downloads a csv file through yahoo's finance site and then parses it and prints out the date and adjusted close for each business day that has data.



require 'open-uri'

require 'csv'



def get_adjusted_close stock_symbol

  puts "-- #{stock_symbol} Adjusted Close - Historical --"

  url = "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=#{stock_symbol}&d=7&e=1&f=2006&g=d&a=2&b=26&c=1990&ignore=.csv"

  puts "Connecting to #{url}\n"



  csv = CSV.parse(open(url).read)



  csv.each{|row|

    puts "#{row[0]} - #{row.last}"

  }

  puts "---------------------------------"

end



example_stocks = "CSCO GOOG"

print "Enter a series of stock symbols separated by spaces (example: #{example_stocks}) to retrieve the historical adjusted close.\n"

stock_symbols = gets

stock_symbols ||= example_stocks



stock_symbols.split.each{|symbol|

  get_adjusted_close(symbol)

}

DZone Snippets: stock_data code

Snippet to grab historical data for stocks