PayPal Download History screen
4. Select a date range. It doesn??™t matter which range you pick for this example, as
long as it reflects some activity on your PayPal account.
5. From the File Types for Download drop-down list, select Comma Delimited - All
Activity.
6. Click Download History.
7. When prompted to save the file, do so. Remember the location, as you??™ll use this
file in this chapter??™s example.
CHAPTER 7 n TRACKING EXPENDITURES WITH PAYPAL 135
nNote Why aren??™t we automating the download? Unfortunately, it??™s because there??™s no web service available
to download it programmatically. It??™s possible to script the download using, say, the Ruby net/http.rb
download library and an HTML parsing library like Hpricot, but unless you have explicit permission from the
web site in question, that??™s typically not a good idea. Potentially, you could be blocked from PayPal or, in an
extreme situation, get sued. However, if you do decide to take that route, you might want to employ a library
that is easier to use than Ruby??™s built-in libraries, such as scRUBYt! (http://scrubyt.
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