In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> transmitted: > "Grimes, Jessica C" wrote: >> >> I want to create a program that will ask the user what stock he/she >> wants to look up. The program will then extract financial data from >> yahoo and import it into a spreadsheet. >> >> My problem is that I don't know how to make the application take the >> user's input (the stock's ticker symbol) and place the user's input >> from python into the space where yahoo accepts input for a ticker >> symbol and activate yahoo's "Look up" click command. > > You should investigate HTML forms. The web page contains a form > which has several fields and a target URL. If you view the source > for the page (in Netscape, hit Ctrl-U; in IE use the View->Source > menu) you can find buried within it the form and the names of the > fields. Forms use the <form> tag and contain <input> fields. > > Looking at finance.yahoo.com I can see the form calls "/q" when > executed, and has a field named "s" for the stock symbol. You > can easily take such forms and compose a URL which retrieves the > data. In this case this: > > > > does the job for Nortel on the TSE (disclaimer: anyone even > thinking of buying Nortel should probably just keep thinking :-). > The page returned contains the data, but it's embedded deep > in the HTML and you _really_ don't want to waste much of your > time trying to figure this out. There's got to be a better > approach, but I have never spent the time to research it. The SOAPy way would be: #!/usr/bin/env python import SOAP from SOAP import * server = "" namespace= "urn:xmethods-delayed-quotes" serv = SOAP.SOAPProxy(server, namespace=namespace) stocks = ["LNUX", "NT", "TSG", "RHAT", "IBM", "MSFT", "AMR"] print "Stock Price" print "================" stocks.sort for el in stocks: print "%6s %8.3f" % (el, serv.getQuote(symbol=el)) -- (reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc@" "sirhc")) "war is an inappropriate analogy; ``flame war'' is a misnomer. in any usenet exchange, the only casualty is time. there are better uses for regret." --thi <ttn at netcom.com>