Automatic stock price upload

OhLordy

I would like my website to automatically update the stock price for a number of different shares. I don't want to have to do this myself, I would like to know if there is a way of pulling this information off another website at set time intervals (using CRON jobs probaly).

Any help would be appreciated.
Rob

PS
If I can do this I would also like to know about using PHP to create my own png files so that I can create a dynamic graph of recent stock prices.

maxpup979

sure...use an fopen, or wget to grab the page that has the stock prices, parse out the stuff you dont need.

and yes, you can then use PHP to greate your graph. All the info is in the image functions section in the manual

OhLordy

I just tried to do fopen("http://www.skippetbambam.co.uk/home.php","rb");
and got a parse error. Does this mean I cannot open web locations with fopen?
If so is there a function that allows me to because I need to pull this data from another site on another server.

OhLordy

My mistake I had a typo. I just tried it again though (I'm sure I have no typo and I'm sure the file exists becuase I can view it directly by typing the url into my address bar) and I'm getting an error saying No such file or directory.

OhLordy

This is the code for my test file

<?
$file = "http://www.skippetybambam.co.uk/home.php";
$directory = "http://www.skippetybambam.co.uk/pics";

echo($file . "<br>" . $directory . "<br>");

if(file_exists($file)) {
	echo("This file exists<br>");
} else {
	echo("this file does not exist<br>");
}


if(is_dir($directory)) {
	echo("This file is a directory<br>");
} else {
	echo("This is not a directory<br>");
}
?>

And this is what I get as output

http://www.skippetybambam.co.uk/home.php
http://www.skippetybambam.co.uk/pics
this file does not exist
This is not a directory

I know for a fact that the file does exist and so does the directory. Please help 😕

Rob

OhLordy

I've also looked into coding an ftp client to do the job but I don't have this enables on the server that I am using.
Does anyone else have any ideas?

Kerry_Kobashi

Scraping data off a website is possible... you just need to search for markers within the webpage and then determine the substring and the length of the string to pull out.

Be aware though that if YOUR webpage gets numerous page hits, at some point the website you are pulling information off will contact you due to copyright priviledges. (You don't get something for nothing...)

OhLordy

Am I using fopen correctly in my code to do this. The problem I am getting is that I can't seem to get the fopen command to work with http at all. NB my wrox php4 pro book says that I can use fopen with ftp and http as well as just local filesystem but it doesn't explain how this is done.

With regard to the second part of your post, do you think that there would be sites willing to give out slighlt old prices (6-8 hours old) for free?

Rob

hykc

i just tried this

<?PHP
$file = fopen("http://www.skippetybambam.co.uk/home.php","r"); 

if($file) {
    echo("This file exists<br>");
} else {
    echo("this file does not exist<br>");
}

?>