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


I can't get the $ans to return any value when used in
the $myhash{$ans,'price'}; statement.  
The first part print $ans . "-" works fine. 

Why wont the $ans variable work in the function?

I have tried a static variable and it works fine.

Thanks Mike

************************************************

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Finance::Quote;

open (SLIST,"</scripts/test.txt");
@stocks = <SLIST>;
close (SLIST);

$q = Finance::Quote->new;
$cc = 'usa';
$symb = 'WTVN.PK';

%myhash = $q->fetch($cc,@stocks);

foreach $ans (@stocks){

print $ans ."-". $myhash{$ans,'price'};

}

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Finance::Quote; and foreach
by runrig (Abbot) on Apr 03, 2006 at 05:48 UTC
    chomp your stock symbols:
    chomp(@stocks = <SLIST>);

    [download]
    Finance::Quote returns the data even though you have the linefeeds, but your for loop does not access the data because the hash keys returned from fetch() do not have linefeeds.
[reply]
[d/l]
      
chomp ROCKS!!  

Thanks for the help it worked great!

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Finance::Quote; and foreach
by bowei_99 (Friar) on Apr 03, 2006 at 06:02 UTC
    Your code worked for me. I used it to look up Google's stock, and got a correct value of 390.

    I think your problem lies in your file - for some reason, perl isn't reading in the values from the file as you expect it would. Since you (and I) hard code a variable, and it works fine, plus the fact that I don't know what your /scripts/test.txt file looks like, I suspect it's something with that file.

    Here's the code I got to work, with comments. I included some code you can run to help confirm if it's reading in the contents of the file correctly. 

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use Finance::Quote;
use Carp;

# This should give you more info if it couldn't read the file
open SLIST, <, "/scripts/test.txt"
        or croak "Cannot open file - $!\n";
@stocks = <SLIST>;
close (SLIST);

# This will confirm that the stocks read in from the file are 
#  what you expect
print "Checking stocks: ";
for my $stock (@stocks) {
        print "$stock ";
}
print "\n";

# the following code (uncommented) worked fine for me. 
#   It got google's stock quote correctly
#@stocks = ("GOOG");

$q = Finance::Quote->new;
$cc = 'usa';
$symb = 'WTVN.PK';  # What is this used for?  If not needed, good to d
+elete it

%myhash = $q->fetch($cc,@stocks);

foreach $ans (@stocks){
        print $ans ."-". $myhash{$ans,'price'};
}

    [download]

    -- Burvil

[reply]
[d/l]
      If you actually read the data from a file instead of hardcoding the symbol in the program, you would see the problem (that the data coming in from the file has linefeeds).
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom