Download Current WSJ.com Prime Rate
<p>I need to automatically download the current Wall Street Journal Prime Rate and load the data into my database.  What is the best method for downloading this data automatically?</p>

<p>I have come up with three possible solutions for doing this:</p>

<ol>
<li>Scrape a HTML web page from WSJ.</li>
<li>Parse a RSS news feed from WSJ.</li>
<li>Use some API that I haven't found from WSJ.</li>
</ol>

<p>Regarding solution 1, although I don't like solution 1 since it could easily break, it's the only one that I have worked out from end to end.  It appears I can scrape <a href="http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-moneyrate.html?mod=topnav_2_3000" rel="nofollow">this page</a> with a WebRequest / WebResponse and read the text in this code:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td style="text-align:left" class="colhead"&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="colhead"&gt;Latest&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="colhead"&gt;Wk ago&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="colhead"&gt;High&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="colhead"&gt;Low&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td class="text"&gt;U.S.&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td style="font-weight:bold;" class="num"&gt;3.25&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="num"&gt;3.25&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="num"&gt;3.25&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td class="num" style="border-right:0px"&gt;3.25&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Regarding solution 2, although I can implement a RSS reader solution, I don't see a way to reliably anticipate verbiage for changes in the Prime Rate.  Therefore, I don't think this is as safe or reliable a way to get the data as solution 1.</p>

<p>Regarding solution 3, I haven't found any published API's for checking money rates like the Prime Rate.  If anyone knows of a web service or other API for checking money rates, then please let me know.</p>
