In this article, we will talk about how to reverse engineer Google finance charts to parse them using Ruby on Rails.

Introduction


‌ When you search in Google for something like Bitcoin price or bitcoin vs dollar we will notice a chart and very rich finance data, originally the source of this data is Google finance.‌
‌‌
‌‌
What is Google finance?
‌‌
Google Finance is a website focusing on business news and financial information hosted by Google.

Google finance data & chart “bitcoin vs dollar” — SerpApi

Getting started


We will ignore all the other data and we will focus on parsing the chart only as the extract of the other elements has been covered by other SerpApi blog posts.‌
‌‌
Basically, every chart or graph consists of two important parts (x-axis and y-axis).‌
‌‌
The x-axis is a horizontal line and the y-axis is a vertical line.‌
‌‌

Coordinate grid y-axis and x-axis chart — SerpApi

Now we just need to understand the numbers in the Google finance chart, The y-axis represents the price column, and the x-axis represents the time.

y-axis and x-axis represents the price and time — SerpApi
y-axis and x-axis represents the price and time — SerpApi

It’s obvious now in the screenshot above, the price is 56,854.90 at 8:05.
‌‌
‌Now we will find the chart CSS class:‌

Chart CSS selector — SerpApi

In this example, we will take the attribute jsdata but we should note that the input of this attribute is changing every search.‌
‌‌
‌So by using REGEX we will extract the last element inside  jsdata="Wplt6c;_;AWRM64" which means the element we want is AWRM64

Using regex to extract chart data — SerpApi

1- This is the Regex that we used to search in the page source for the chart data.‌
2- Is the raw HTML page — to search inside of it.‌
3- The result, which it’s the group of the chart JSON data.

After formatting the JSON, now we need to understand what’s inside the JSON carefully.

JSON chart data — SerpApi

1- This number represents the price.‌
2- This one represents the time in minutes.‌

Putting everything together


‌Now we have to use dig method to extract the JSON data we need, which it consists of the x-axis and y-axis arrays (price and time).‌
‌‌
‌and then we will convert the time from minutes to hours, we will use this formula to get the UNIX time:

unix_time = time * 60

and the last thing to do is convert the unix_time to DateTime ( UTC Y-M-D:H:M )

data[:time] = Time.at(time * 60).utc.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M %p")


The final result:

Serpapi.com parsing google finance chart

Ending:

You can find the documentation about how to use serpapi and you can follow us on Twitter at @serp_api, to get our latest news and articles.

Alaa Abdulridha on EmailAlaa Abdulridha on FacebookAlaa Abdulridha on GithubAlaa Abdulridha on InstagramAlaa Abdulridha on LinkedinAlaa Abdulridha on Twitter
Alaa Abdulridha
My name is Alaa Abdulridha I'm a computer engineering student and cybersecurity researcher I'm interested in web application pen-testing and game development, also I'm interested in some bug bounty programs, I like a lot of things such as reverse engineering, reading the others code to learn and then to find my own exploits and teaching it to you, Do you want to know more about me? Click Here.