Damn. I didn't get rid of all of the html that was confusing the original message. This should be clearer.

At 23:35 +0000 10/6/09, Jinye Jeff Li wrote:
>I am a new user of Curl. When I try download some data from the yahoo website, I got an "Missing >Format Variable" error. I hope someone can kindly point what is wrong. Here is the command I used:
 
>curl http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=@%5EIXIC&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&h=0.
 
>Here is the return:
 
>Missing Format Variable.
>'f' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
>operable program or batch file.
>'e' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
>operable program or batch file.
>'h' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
>operable program or batch file.

What's happening is that your shell is looking at the http string and doing things to it before curl gets to look at it.

? question marks, & ampersands, and that @ sign probably need to be protected from interpretation depending on which shell or other scripting language is in use.

curl "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=@%5EIXIC&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&h=0"

should work better.

<ftp://ftp.macnauchtan.com/Excel/yahooquote.pl> Is an example that's almost what you want in perl.

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