Getting Stock Quotes Using Yahoo Query Language (YQL)

In a previous post, we learned about how to get Yahoo Stock Quotes in Excel.

This is quite useful, but what if you have your own platform or a webpage, within which you automatically want to get the desired stock data, which keeps updating automatically.

The guys at yahoo have created this wonderful Yahoo Query Language (YQL). YQL treats individual web services as though they were data tables, allowing developers to formulate SQL-like queries to extract information from them. The YQL service takes care of parsing the query string, executing it on the remote service, and returning the results in standard XML or JSON format. The results in the XML or the JSON format can then be easily utilized in any application.

As you can notice, this query utilizes the yahoo.finance.quotes open data table, to make it work.

Since the results are in XML and JSON format, you can make use of this data in practically any application, and even build new applications.