MDBitz Development Resources

Due to the increased usage and amount of projects and utilities that can be found here on my developer blog, I have decided it is time to create a separate site for them allowing for users to find relevant examples and information easier. Therefore the MDBitz – Project Laboratory is know available. Currently I have ported over all the examples and information on the Harvest API and Yahoo Finance API Wrapper Libraries.

Slowly over the next few weeks/months I will be updating all the pages and content found in this blog to reflect the new site. In the mean time please be patient as the site maintenance is in progress.

Today (March 12^th, 2010) I released Version 1.2 of my YahooFinanceAPI PHP Wrapper Library. This version adds constants defining the Stock Options available from Yahoo Finance. A minor change to be sure, but one that can come in handy to those new to Stock Quotes and the available options.

All the constants are defined in the YahooFinance_Options class and are to be utilized when setting the options to be returned and when getting their values out of the returned stock quotes.

Setting the Options

$api->addOption( YahooFinance_Options::SYMBOL );
$api->addOption( YahooFinance_Options::PREVIOUS_CLOSE);
$api->addOption( YahooFinance_Options::OPEN );
$api->addOption( YahooFinance_Options::LAST_TRADE );

Getting the Stock Option value

$quote->get( YahooFinance_Options::SYMBOL );
$quote->get( YahooFinance_Options::PREVIOUS_CLOSE );
$quote->get( YahooFinance_Options::OPEN );
$quote->get( YahooFinance_Options::LAST_TRADE );

To see full sample code as well as staying up-to-date on changes to the library then please visit the PHP Wrapper Library for Yahoo Finance Stock Quotes API page that is maintained with the latest version for download and usage examples.

Yesterday February 23^rd, 2010 I released version 1.1 of my YahooFinanceAPI PHP library. This release adds in support for localization of the information so that you can get the stock quote time and date information in your local timezone, if Yahoo Finance supports your local.

To set your local simply set the local property of YahooFinanceAPI to a valid location.

$api->local = YahooFinance_Location::FRANCE;

To make it easier on users I have added the YahooFinance_Location class that contains constants of all the valid locals supported by Yahoo Finance. To see full sample code as well as staying up-to-date on changes to the library then please visit the PHP Wrapper Library for Yahoo Finance Stock Quotes API page that is maintained with the latest version for download and usage examples.

For those that aren’t familiar with Yahoo Finance. They provide a simple api for obtaining information (quote) on stocks. To learn the basics of how it works you can read the post Yahoo Finance Stock API, and Understanding Yahoo Finance Stock Quotes and sl1d1t1c1ohgv which outlines the various information that you can request.

However these posts simply inform you of the United States Localized url for obtaining the information. For those in other parts of the world you can use a localized url to get time and date information based on your location. This is done by prepending the country code to the url. For example Germany would prepend de to the url and would download the information at:

http://de.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=DELL&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv

A full list of Country Codes can be found below.

Country Codes

Also as Bastian pointed out in the comments the csv file does not use the , (comma) character as the delimiter for localizations that use commas instead of the period in displaying currency. In these cases the delimiter that is used is the ; (semicolon). The full list of countries with the different delimiter is below.

Localizations with ; delimiter

To those just starting to utilize Yahoo Finance to obtain stock information you may get a little disoriented by the query string sl1d1t1c1ohgv. Although at first glance the string sl1d1t1c1ohgv may seem like random letters and numbers it is actually responsible for telling Yahoo Finance what information to return to you. Instead of sending dozens of individual parameters to determine what information to return Yahoo Finance choose to simply concatenate the variables together. Below is a breakdown of what stock information you can return in your quote.

Stock Quote Variables

So what doessl1d1t1c1ohgv stand for?

It tells Yahoo Finance to return the following information about the stock requested.

• Symbol (s)
• Last Trade Value (l1)
• Lat Trade Date (d1)
• Last Trade Time (t1)
• Change (c1)
• Open (o)
• Days High (h)
• Days Low (g)
• Volume (v)

To make accessing the Yahoo Finance Stock Quote service easier for potential users, I have created a Yahoo Finance PHP Wrapper Library that you can utilize to query for stock quotes and information. The library returns the requested data as objects that you can easily extract information from, for full details visit the release page

Resources

• YahooFinanceAPI – PHP Library for accessing Yahoo Stock Finances
• AJAX & JSONP Example – How to pull in Stock information utilizing AJAX and JSONP