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How to get a real-time stock quote using Google API

January 5th, 2009 | 11 Comments | Tagged as bash, Internet, Mac, software, stocks

After resolving the problem with authentication, I continued playing around with Google Finance API, using HTTP and XML. The API offers some nice functionality to retrieve user portfolio content, but it doesn’t take long to realize that there is no support for retrieving (real-time) stock quotes, probably for some good reason like licensing. But then, there is a way of getting real-time stock quotes on your Google Spreadsheet using the GoogleFinance() formula. Can this fact get us closer to retrieving real-time stock quotes using Google Data API?

Troubleshooting 401 with GoogleLogin Authorization header

I was writing a small script to retrieve some data from Google Finance using the relevant Google Data API. I’m writing a stand-alone, desktop application and have therefore used the ClientLogin username and password authentication. The login worked fine, I was receiving HTTP status 200 and the appropriate response with the authentication token. Yet any subsequent attempt to use the Data API (to insance to retrieve the portfolio data) failed with HTTP 401 Token Invalid error.