Download Current WSJ.com Prime Rate

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Published on 2010-04-21T00:26:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 0:33 UTC
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I need to automatically download the current Wall Street Journal Prime Rate and load the data into my database. What is the best method for downloading this data automatically?

I have come up with three possible solutions for doing this:

  1. Scrape a HTML web page from WSJ.
  2. Parse a RSS news feed from WSJ.
  3. Use some API that I haven't found from WSJ.

Regarding solution 1, although I don't like solution 1 since it could easily break, it's the only one that I have worked out from end to end. It appears I can scrape this page with a WebRequest / WebResponse and read the text in this code:

<tr>
<td style="text-align:left" class="colhead">&nbsp;</td>
<td class="colhead">Latest</td>
<td class="colhead">Wk ago</td>
<td class="colhead">High</td>
<td class="colhead">Low</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="text">U.S.</td>
<td style="font-weight:bold;" class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num">3.25</td>
<td class="num" style="border-right:0px">3.25</td>
</tr>

Regarding solution 2, although I can implement a RSS reader solution, I don't see a way to reliably anticipate verbiage for changes in the Prime Rate. Therefore, I don't think this is as safe or reliable a way to get the data as solution 1.

Regarding solution 3, I haven't found any published API's for checking money rates like the Prime Rate. If anyone knows of a web service or other API for checking money rates, then please let me know.

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