By pacoit on

Hi,
My module generates an information page for each stock I have in the database. I would like to include a block with newsfeed for that particular stock (eg, http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=csco). The stock list changes from week to week. So I thought I would do the RSS http request to Yahoo during page generation, and use built-in functions to get, parse, and theme the RSS file. But I don't see any built-in functions to do that. Perhaps I'm not seeing the drupal way. Can someone suggest how this could be done in drupal? Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

pacoit’s picture

pacoit commented

To followup, There is no built-in function. But it's trivial to setup. I created a block and inserted the following code:

// parse url to get stock ticker
$p = explode('/',$_GET['q']);
$ticker = end($p);
$url = 'http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s='.$ticker;

// retreive RSS and parse
$rss = simplexml_load_file($url);
#$title = (string) $rss->channel->title;
$headlines = "<ul>\n";
foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item)
  $headlines .= "<li><a href='".(string)$item->link."'>" .(string)$item->title."</a></li>\n";
$headlines .= "</ul>\n";

// theme contents in a box in a page region; params: title, contents, region 
echo theme_box("News for: $ticker",$headlines,'right sidebar');

I considered creating a regular drupal configured feed on-the-fly, but resisted thinking ~2k stock feeds would be messy. But, especially when considering the need for caching, it may be the better way in the end.