Thread: Data program advice

Hi there
I'm looking for a bit of help to create software that will gather information from various websites, such as live/current prices that are constantly changing and display them in a program in real time. My programming knowledge is very basic (loops, arrays...) but am looking forward to learning!
Does anyone know the best way of going about this? I'm not in any rush but it's a long-term goal I'd like to achieve.
Thanks in advance,
David

Feel free to move to another forum as I wasn't sure where to post this

Search for topics, tutorials, discussions on java data mining, web page scraping, etc. It's hard to point someone to specific info when their level of knowledge isn't known or demonstrated and admitted to be "very basic." It's a good goal and something to keep in mind, but keep building on your basic knowledge until you understand the basics very well and can comfortably use Object Oriented Programming (OOP) principles.

There probably is a better place for this, but I haven't decided where yet.

That's great thanks for that. At least I now know the name of what I'm searching for, which makes it easier!
Thanks again

You're welcome. Good luck.

I would recommend looking up how to grab html source from site and regex

Originally Posted by TroostMe

I would recommend looking up how to grab html source from site and regex

I wouldn't. Regex and html documents don't play well. A proper DOM parser is needed. Better yet JSON, RSS or XML depending on what the source website uses. JSON is becoming very popular for passing data around through web services because it is human readable, well structured and valid javascript.

As GregBrannon says though this is something OP needs to work upwards towards.