yahoo finance stock quote api

Question

Is there any way to get historical stock prices from the yahoo api in the json format? I'd like to use REST because it's more lightweight.

Answer 1

To follow up on user586050's answer with a specific example...

You can use the YQL yahoo.finance.historical data table for this request, and have the results come back in JSON format.

For example try this query (the link will take you to the YQL console where you can play with it):

select * from yahoo.finance.historicaldata where symbol = "YHOO" and startDate = "2009-09-11" and endDate = "2009-09-15"

Sample results in JSON format:

{
 "query": {
  "count": 3,
  "created": "2011-12-31T19:44:20Z",
  "lang": "en-US",
  "results": {
   "quote": [
    {
     "date": "2009-09-15",
     "Date": "2009-09-15",
     "Open": "16.01",
     "High": "16.49",
     "Low": "15.87",
     "Close": "16.41",
     "Volume": "64668200",
     "Adj_Close": "16.41"
    },
    {
     "date": "2009-09-14",
     "Date": "2009-09-14",
     "Open": "15.45",
     "High": "15.58",
     "Low": "15.28",
     "Close": "15.57",
     "Volume": "19451200",
     "Adj_Close": "15.57"
    },
    {
     "date": "2009-09-11",
     "Date": "2009-09-11",
     "Open": "15.53",
     "High": "15.68",
     "Low": "15.41",
     "Close": "15.59",
     "Volume": "26860700",
     "Adj_Close": "15.59"
    }
   ]
  }
 }
}