Stock Exchange and PHP

[brendanh]

Hi,

I need to create a live stock exchange feed/graph on a website, similar to Bloomberg and all your general stock exchange sites. Does anyone know how or where I can read up on such a thing. I have been searching around but have come up empty handed.

Is there a way to manipulate RSS feeds to show as a live graph or is there some custom software that I can embed on a site and customise the look. This product does not have to be free. My client would be willing to pay.

Thanks.

[bpat1434]

Well, depending on how the RSS feed is structured, if they update the feed every 15 minutes, and have the previous 3.75 hours worth of information (for a total of 16 datapoints (4 per hour * 3.75 = 15 + current point = 16)) then you could easily create a line-graph noting the maximum number as well as the minimum.

Then it's just a matter of knowing where to plot each point. Do note that the top left of an image is 0,0 in PHP, and not the bottom left (as a normal graph). So you might have to do some minor mathematics to figure out where the datapoint lies from the bottom of the image (or graph) or the top of the graph.

I don't know of any PHP items that do this, but I'm sure given enough time it can be done rather easily.

Note that the functions you'd want to use to do this on your own are:
[man]DOMXML[/man]
[man]SimpleXML[/man]
[man]imagecreate[/man]
[man]imageline[/man]

Of course there are others (like for different colors & text and all) but those are the basics that should get you going.

[brendanh]

Hi,

Thanks for your help, will have to give that a go