There's a fairly easy way of retrieving 15-minute delayed quotes off of Yahoo! Finance web site ("quotes.csv" API).

However, so far I was unable to find any info on how to access real-time quotes.

The hang-ups with real-time quotes are:

• Only available to logged-in user
• No API
• Non-obvious how to scrape the info - I'm somewhat convinced they are placed on the page by some weird Ajax call.

So I was wondering if anyone had managed to develop a publically available solution to retrieve real-time quotes for a stock from Yahoo! Finance.

Notes:

• Implementation language/framework need is flexible but Perl or Excel is highly preferred.

• Assume that security is not an issue - I'm willing to supply yahoo userid and pasword, even in cleartext.

• I'm not 100% hung up on Yahoo - they are merely the only provider of free realtime stock quotes I'm familiar with. if the same thing can be done with Google Finance, I'd be just as happy.

• This is for a personal project, so scalability/fault tolerance/etc... are not important.

• I'm looking for a "do the whole retrieval" library ideally, but if I'm pointed to partial solutions (e.g. how to retrieve info from Yahoo's user-logged-in pages; how to scrape realtime quotes from Yahoo's page) I can fill in the blanks.

I saw Finance::YahooQuote but it does not seem to allow you to supply log-in information and appears to use the lagging quotes.csv API

Thanks!