Article -- Perl: Creating a Stock Alert Program

Creating a Program in Perl to Check Stock Prices

This is a simple example of how to use the CPAN module Finance::Quote to check stock prices then diplay a result if they are not in a specific range.

This program reads from a text file in the following format.

"exchange", "symbol", "highprice", "lowprice"
"nasdaq", "GOOG", "300", "280"

#!/usr/bin/perl
#

use Finance::Quote;
$q = Finance::Quote->new;

open(INFILE, "./stocks.txt") or die;
while()
{
        @List = split(/,/, $_);
        @StockNames = split(/\"/, $List[1]);
        @StockXchange = split(/\"/, $List[0]);
        @High = split(/\"/, $List[2]);
        @Low = split(/\"/, $List[3]);
        %quotes  = $q->fetch($StockXchange[1],$StockNames[1]);
        if($quotes{$StockNames[1], "last"} > $High[1])
        {
                print "$StockNames[1] is too high\n";
        }
        if($quotes{$StockNames[1], "last"} < $Low[1])
        {
                print "$StockNames[1] is too low\n";
        }
}