Question

I am looking for some stock symbol look-up API. I could able to query yahoo finance with a symbol & could able to retrieve the stock price & other details.

Is there any API for stock symbol searches

Any help would be great ..

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use Python’s urllib or the mechanise library to scrape the data from a website which publishes this data. Mechanise would be a better choice if the website requires some interaction before you can get hold of the data (like logging in).

EDIT – for getting stock quote for BT from Yahoo’s UK site:

>>> import urllib
>>> import re
>>> data = urllib.urlopen('http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BT&m=L&d=').read()
>>> re.search('<span id="yfs_l10_bt-a\.l".*?>([0-9.]+)', data).group(1)
'122.00'

The id in the regular expression was taken by viewing the source of the page and finding the id of the tag that surrounded the data required.