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Using Internet Sites and Using Data not in a Table

Internet data access information is stored in a file called FTSWEB.INI.  It has the following format.

Line 1: The number of sites supported (e.g., 1 if you only trade using one internet site)

Line 2:  The description (e.g., “Data from the CBOE”) that appears when you add a security

Line 3: The URL excluding the ticker, e.g., http://quote.cboe.com/SimpleQuote.asp?ticker=

Lines 4 and 5: String1 and String2: when the program reads the data, it reads in the contents of the web page that a browser would display.  The price quote must lie strictly between String1 and String2 in the text received by a browser.

Line 6: String3  This is a phrase that appears in the text immediately before the quote; after that, the program searches for “tags” which are > and < to obtain the quote.

Lines 2-6 are then repeated for the next Internet site.

You may want to view the page source of a quote from the CBOE and see how the page is parsed using the strings in the file FTSWEB.INI.