Title: Graph historical stock prices in C#

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

// Get the prices for this symbol. private List GetStockPrices(string symbol) { // Compose the URL. string url = "http://www.google.com/finance/" + "historical?output=csv&q=" + symbol; // Get the web response. string result = GetWebResponse(url); // Get the historical prices. string[] lines = result.Split( new char[] { '\r', '\n' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); List prices = new List(); // Process the lines, skipping the header. for (int i = 1; i < lines.Length; i++) { string line = lines[i]; prices.Add(float.Parse(line.Split(',')[4])); } return prices; }

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 the file into lines and saves the prices in a List of float that it returns to the calling code.

Download the example to experiment with it and to see additional details.