Question

I’m new here and I hope I’m not asking something which has already been answered. I have searched everywhere but am yet to discover an adequate answer.

My objective is fairly simple: I want to create a program which will stream the live gold and silver rates from: this website

How would I be able to pinpoint the values that I want to download? Currently, I have managed to implement this using Microsoft Excel’s web query feature wherein I am able to select a table from the webpage. However, I want to make it a standalone application.

By the way, I need to retrieve the rates to perform a calculation which is then displayed to the user.

I would greatly appreciate any ideas on how this can be achieved.

Answer 1

I think you need to scrape or parse the data from your website. For that take a look at htmlcleaner, JSoup html parsers.

You can use XPath with htmlcleaner to pinpoint the data.Here is a nice example Xpath Example.

You can use firefox’s firebug extension to get the xpath of an element. But your xpath is going to be very huge, by the look of the website you mentioned.

Than you have to execute the code at specified interval of your choice.

And if there is javascript in play than you have to execute the javascript running behind the page using your java code.

Try using Rhino from Mozilla and using its integration libraries or by using the JDK 1.6 ScriptEngine facility.

For ScriptEngine Example take a look here- http://metoojava.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/execute-javascript-from-java/

In, short take a look at html parsers to parse the content of your page.