Ideas on how to fetch data daily from remote website.

Trent_Hatred

Hi Folks,

I was hoping someone here could give me some ideas on how to go about fetching an interest rate from the following page:

http://www.bmo.com/rates/index.html

Essentially what I need it to do is retrieve the interest rate daily.

I've had no success in finding any workable fetch scripts, so I'm wondering if this is even possible?

Thanks much,
B

olaf

hallo what is your source for this interest rate ?

Trent_Hatred

Hi Olaf,

The source is http://www.bmo.com/rates/index.html You'll see it lists today's interest rate at 4.500%, and it is updated daily.

Thanks for your interest. 🙂
B

olaf

i mean what is the source for the value?

via mysql,xml,manual entry?

Trent_Hatred

Hi Olaf,

I'm not sure I understand correctly.

What I want to do is retrieve that interest rate from the remote site (ie. 4.500%) via php. After it's retrieved, I would then insert the value into our local mySQL database so that I can perform calculations based on it.

I assume it would involve retrieving the entire remote page, and then parsing the percentage out.

I can insert the value into mySQL just fine once retrieved, and I can setup a daily cron job to run the script.

LordShryku

Before going any further....do you have permission from bmo.com to do this? You should read their legal page if not

© Copyright Bank of Montreal 1996 - 2003
Unauthorized use of the Bank's logos and/or name, trade names or trade-marks or trade names is prohibited. All information at this site is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and in other countries. In addition, certain information may be copyrighted by others. Unless otherwise specified, no one has permission to copy, redistribute, reproduce or republish in any form, any information found at this Website. If you wish to incorporate the Bank name or trade names, or our products names within another site, please contact us for permission.

Anyway, you can figure out how to do it by searching the forums for using fopen on remote pages. One thing you'll want to do is break out of all of the frames, and use the source page you'll be getting, which is http://www.bmo.com/cgi-bin/t3bmo.cgi/rates/viewRates.taf?rate=prime

Trent_Hatred

Hi LordShryku,

Good point on the legalities. I'll definately have to take a closer look at the fine print.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll see what I come up with after a bit of reading.

Trent_Hatred

Ok, after reading a bit about fopen, I've come up with this script which is working just fine in grabbing the remote site:

<?php

ini_set("allow_url_fopen", "1");

$file = "http://www.bmo.com/cgi-bin/t3bmo.cgi/rates/viewRates.taf?rate=prime";

echo $file;

$file = fopen($file, "r");

echo $file;

$file = fread($file, 4096);

echo $file;

exit;
?>

It grabs the remote page and displays it properly. Now then, and this is where I figured I'd have the most problems ...

How do I parse out the interest rate from it? Can anyone give me some pointers on using regular expressions to do this?

The interest rate will always appear on line 18 as:

Thanks much,
B

AstroTeg

I'm a fan of being lazy... I'd just split the content using explode and then strip the HTML tags:

$aData = explode('<td valign=middle align=center><font face="sans-serif" size="+2"><b>', $webpage);

$interest = trim(strip_tags($aData[1]));

You could definitely use regular expressions and they would probably be a little safer to use. Probably have the regular expression home in on the bold tags and just return the stuff in the middle. There's a couple ways to do this...

LordShryku

I was thinking about the same thing

$rate = strrchr(rtrim(strip_tags($file))," ");

Trent_Hatred

Beautiful! Those both work great, thanks folks.

I had tried that earlier, but I had oh ... 7 or 8 lines of code trying to do the exact same thing.

Mental Note to Self - Think more simple... think more simple ... *

Thanks again.
B