2 replies to this topic

[kipale]

Hello, I'd like to ask some help on how to tackle this issue of mine :)


Let me just explain it to you first. I am a stock investor and like any investor I'm handling loads of information every day. Now some of this information is very easy to find, but some require hard work to aquire.

Thing is there is a lot of companies and on all websites I know of the most detailed info about them is only displayed on a page dedicated to that company. But I would like to compare those companies, for example their P/E values. For that I would have to go to the company page, write down the P/E, go to next company page, write down the P/E of that company etc.

My job would be so much easier if I had a robot going to each page, get the value for me and make a nice table out of them for me. Then I could just import the list to MS Excel or something and analyze it easily.


I guess you got the point. Now I'm a newbie in programming, and I haven't done it for 5 years or something (I never even was good) so if anyone can think of an existing program that can do this I would be pleased. I couldn't find any on google at least (yeah yeah maybe I didn't try hard enough, but there is like a lot of webpages in the internet nowadays to search from).

If nobody knows of such data gathering program then I guess it's still easier to write the program than to write all those values down by hand. Every time, as many companies as I got time for, 4 times a year (**** capitalists who invented quartal economy). Ideas for this?

[kipale]

I forgot to mention... With company page I mean a page inside website like finance.google.com. So every company page has same format. I know a program that can download every page to my computer so I only need something to remove all the unnecessary crap from the html code and just leave the table I need. And then merge all tables from different files into one.

[WingedPanther]

I'd probably hand-code it.