Pull information from a website into my website

Question

I am trying to add information into my website that is drawn from another website. This is information like the current local temperature from weather.com or the current stock price from yahoo finance or the current exchange rate from some other site. I need the numbers, not just an iframe or screenshot.

Is this possible?

Step 1: Talk to a copyright lawyer. Step 2: Pick a programming language. — Quentin, Aug 20 '15 at 16:20

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 20 '15 at 16:47

1

Yes it is.

But you can't achieve it with pure HTML. You need use either a server-side scripting languages such as PHP or a client-side scripting language such as JavaScript. But JavaScript can cause problems because most browsers requests a Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. Yahoo's YQL (Yahoo Query Language) allows all requests from anywhere so you can use it. Yahoo has weather and currency (I don't know for sure)

edited Aug 20 '15 at 16:47

acrosman

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answered Aug 20 '15 at 16:21

Emre Aydin

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How do I do this with js. Most of what I need can be done on yahoo. – ToMakPo Aug 20 '15 at 17:15
You can find various tutorial about jquery and its ajax API. I can't tell you the whole deal about this here. You need to make some research. – Emre Aydin Aug 20 '15 at 17:17
I know about jquery. Could you give me a keyword to focus on? – ToMakPo Aug 20 '15 at 17:22
What kind of keyword do you want from me? – Emre Aydin Aug 20 '15 at 17:23

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 14 '21 at 17:24

So you basically have two options here. Find free or paid APIs and get the information from them such as this API for weather: http://openweathermap.org/api

The other option is called web-scraping which is basically just scanning the source code of a site with some kind of server side or client side programming language to find the data that you want. The data is usually wrapped in an HTML tag with a certain class or id that you can scan for.

I would suggest trying to go the API route first though because web-scraping is a grey area and it will easily break unless the website you are scraping never makes design/layout changes.

Pull information from a website into my website

2 Answers2