in reply to Quicken and Perl

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.

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Re: Re: Quicken and Perl
by cascade_fx (Sexton) on Apr 14, 2002 at 13:51 UTC
    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.

      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

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