Download Current WSJ.com Prime Rate
Posted
by Registered User
on Stack Overflow
See other posts from Stack Overflow
or by Registered User
Published on 2010-04-21T00:26:05Z
Indexed on
2010/04/21
0:33 UTC
Read the original article
Hit count: 283
wall-street-journal
I need to automatically download the current Wall Street Journal Prime Rate and load the data into my database. What is the best method for downloading this data automatically?
I have come up with three possible solutions for doing this:
- Scrape a HTML web page from WSJ.
- Parse a RSS news feed from WSJ.
- Use some API that I haven't found from WSJ.
Regarding solution 1, although I don't like solution 1 since it could easily break, it's the only one that I have worked out from end to end. It appears I can scrape this page with a WebRequest / WebResponse and read the text in this code:
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left" class="colhead"> </td>
<td class="colhead">Latest</td>
<td class="colhead">Wk ago</td>
<td class="colhead">High</td>
<td class="colhead">Low</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="text">U.S.</td>
<td style="font-weight:bold;" class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num" style="border-right:0px">3.25</td>
</tr>
Regarding solution 2, although I can implement a RSS reader solution, I don't see a way to reliably anticipate verbiage for changes in the Prime Rate. Therefore, I don't think this is as safe or reliable a way to get the data as solution 1.
Regarding solution 3, I haven't found any published API's for checking money rates like the Prime Rate. If anyone knows of a web service or other API for checking money rates, then please let me know.
© Stack Overflow or respective owner
