cascade_fx has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am a big fan of the Quicken tools for financial mangement. I love them. However, my crappy bank will not make my online banking files available in Quicken's .qif format. I have been able to take the info that they give me and put it into a spread sheet. From there, a comma delimited file is just around the corner. Unfortunately, in all of its greatness, Quicken doesn't import CSV's.

I hope that my favorite language, Perl, can come to the rescue. I have done a few searches on Google and here and haven't come up with much. Does anyone have any resources that they can point me to about converting a comma seperated file into Quicken's .qif format? Perl seems like it would be ideal for this. I have a friendly bet going about this... so I need you guys to prove me right on this.

Thanks in advance for your gracious wisdom...

cascadefx

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Quicken and Perl
by JayBonci (Curate) on Apr 14, 2002 at 07:43 UTC
    After a little searching, Intuit gets mad props from me for providing some perl modules directly from their developer website. Hope that gives you enough to get you started.

        --jb
[reply]
      Thanks, I will check these out. If I come up with anything useful, I will post my meager accomplishments.
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Re: Quicken and Perl
by cjf (Parson) on Apr 14, 2002 at 05:54 UTC
    my crappy bank will not make my online banking files available in Quicken's .qif format.

    What formats do they make the data available in?

    Searches on CPAN do not provide results for either Quicken or QIF, so there appears to be a shortage of modules in this area (care to write one? :).

    The GnuCash intro to the QIF format makes it sound like a relatively easy format to work with ("QIF files are plain text files formatted as "tag-value" pairs. At the beginning of each line there is a single character "tag" followed immediately by the "value", which extends to the end of the line."). A Search on quicken.com for 'converting' also turns up a few possibly relevant results.

[reply]
      What formats do they make the data available in?

      To actually call it online banking is almost a joke. They offer secure access to web page reports of your transactions. They offer no direct access to accounts (so you can't reconcile from within Quicken) or downloading of files in any format (DIF or QIF). It is annoying. I am working on enlightening them at the moment. Changing banks isn't really an option, because I hate fees and this one doesn't have any.

      I can select and copy the data from the web page and do a reasonably good formatting job with it in Excel and then save it in comma delimited format. Much of my work with changing software packages on a personal and professional level,in the past, has proved this format to be the holy grail as almost everything can import such a format... just not Quicken... argh.

      Therefore, I thought Perl would be good. Thanks for the resource. I hadn't really thought of GNUCash before. But their notes and the modules mentioned below should put me on the right track.

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        HTML::TokeParser and perhaps even LWP::UserAgent would let you partially or completely automate the task of recovering the data from an HTML page. Then just write the code to export a QIF file and sell the product to your bank so they can offer the service....just a thought.

        cheers

        tachyon

        s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

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Re: Quicken and Perl
by tfrayner (Curate) on Nov 21, 2003 at 13:23 UTC
    By now this (rather old) thread should be dead and buried, but in the spirit of completeness I'd like to point out that there is a module named Finance::QIF that not only parses QIF data but will also export to QIF (which appears to be exactly what you want).

    Tim

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