A few people have requested to see the code for my currency rate fetcher. I
have to ask my boss first. Moderator, please email me if it's appropriate
or not to post the code to the list, or whether I should only email the code
to individuals who request it. Thanks!
-----Original Message-----
From: Vanderhoof, Tzadik
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 10:49 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: currency rate fetcher
I just whipped up a Perl tool that submits a form on a Currency Rate web
site, fetches the resulting HTML, parses out the exchange rate data, and
populates a database table with it, and the tool is accessible as a COM
object. It's only about 60 lines of code, too, much of it error checking.
All this in about 2 hours, most of it spent looking up stuff in
documentation... I had never used PerlCOM before, and it had been a while
since I used ODBC or submitted web forms with Perl. The part that picks out
the useful data from the HTML table is just 3 or 4 lines. I don't know if
this anecdote is significant enough to be called "advocacy" but I was sure
impressed. And if it's so run-of-the-mill to be unimpressive, that fact in
itself is impressive.
As an aside, I found out that a few months ago an experienced C++ programmer
in my company was faced with exactly the same problem and concluded that an
automated solution would take so long to develop that it was better to just
print out the Web page and key the data into the database manually, and
that's what he did.
