Scraping from wsj.com or finance.yahoo.com

Question

I want to display on a wordpress page the total volume of shares traded on the NYSE stock exchange the last 2 weeks that it's been open. What is the best way to go about doing this?

Answer 1

Yahoo Finance lets you export their data. For a ticker, on the left sidebar there is a link to Historical Prices. On the bottom of that page there is a link "Download To Spreadsheet".

You could pass that to fgetcsv to parse it.

Answer 2

Scraping websites for data is generally seen as unethical, depending on your intentions and the frequency of the scrape. The bandwidth isn't free, you know. Instead, you should hopefully be able to find a data feed which has been designed to be consumed by other sites, such as yours.

Not knowing very much about your domain, I wouldn't really know what to search for, but here's some guesses:

• The NYSE website seems to offer a subscription data feed
• Look around the Yahoo Finance page here

Answer 3

Yahoo would be your best bet as they have an unofficial api documented here:

http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm

Tons of apps/widgets rely on this so I can't see it going away

It has in fact gone away, due to yahoo asking that it be taken down.

From first glance, this url would give you what you need: http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=^NYA&f=v