Home
Search
 
What's New
Index
Books
Links
Q & A
Newsletter
Banners
 
Feedback
Tip Jar
 
C# Helper...
 
XML RSS Feed
Follow VBHelper on Twitter Follow VBHelper on Twitter
 
 
 
MSDN Visual Basic Community
 
 
 
 
 
TitleGraph historical stock prices in Visual Basic .NET
DescriptionThis example shows how to graph historical stock prices in Visual Basic .NET.
Keywordsgraphics, stocks, stock prices, graph, example, example program, Windows Forms programming, VB.NET, Visual Basic .NET
CategoriesAlgorithms
 

The key to this example is the GetStockPrices method shown in the following code.

 
' Get the prices for this symbol.
Private Function GetStockPrices(ByVal symbol As String) As _
    List(Of Single)
    ' Compose the URL.
    Dim url As String = _
        "http://www.google.com/finance/historical?output=csv&q=" _
        & symbol

    ' Get the result.
    ' Get the web response.
    Dim result As String = GetWebResponse(url)

    ' Get the historical prices.
    Dim lines() As String = result.Split( _
        New String() {vbCr, vbLf}, _
        StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
    Dim prices As New List(Of Single)()

    ' Process the lines, skipping the header.
    For i As Integer = 1 To lines.Length - 1
        Dim line As String = lines(i)
        prices.Add(Single.Parse(line.Split(","c)(4)))
    Next i

    Return prices
End Function
 

This method composes a URL of the form http://www.google.com/finance/historical?output=csv&q=DIS where DIS is a stock ticker symbol. The Google website returns historical stock data for that symbol in the form of a CSV (comma-separated value) file. The program breaks it into lines and saves the prices in a List of float that it returns to the calling code.

For additional information about how the program works, including how it draws the graph and how the GetWebResponse method works, download the example and look at the code.

 
 
 
 
Copyright © 1997-2010 Rocky Mountain Computer Consulting, Inc.   All rights reserved.
  Updated