The RubyExamples page is a few years old now, but I just came across a great example which still works, and which demonstrates the intense power of Ruby. Please note that Justin Bishop deserves all the credit for this one.

Here's the routine:

class RubyStock
	require 'net/http'
    def RubyStock::getStocks(*symbols)
        Hash[*(symbols.collect{|symbol|[symbol,Hash[\
        *(Net::HTTP.get('quote.yahoo.com','/d?f=nl1&s='+symbol).chop\
        .split(',').unshift("Name").insert(2,"Price"))]];}.flatten)];
    end
end

Using it is simple:

puts RubyStock::getStocks("MSFT", "IBM", "GOOG").inspect 

=> {"GOOG"=>{"Name"=>""GOOGLE"", "Price"=>"386.525"}, "IBM"=>{"Name"=>""INTL BUSINESS MAC"", "Price"=>"76.93"}, "MSFT"=>{"Name"=>""MICROSOFT CP"", "Price"=>"21.51"}}

Amazing! It returns within half a second on my machine, and I can't believe the same scraping logic works after three years.