Python - Yahoo Stock Quote Module

Code like that makes me wish more services used CSV for data. The module does so much, but the code is so clean.

you might think about adding get_price_history(symbol, start_date, end_date). i know their price history interface offers csv output. i use a bash script to retrieve price history right now, but python is so much nicer :)

also, putting all of these functions into a class would be more pythonic ;)

Nicely done. Code has been added to my lib dir.

That's neat !
I second JMC on putting all the functions into a class ...

@JMC
@Tim

I wasn't sure if I should create a class and use all of the functions as methods. If this is how most Python modules work (do they?), then perhaps I should. However, I guess I don't see why this would need to be OO. Since each function is called individually, and no state is stored, I didn't see a reason to use OO. anyone have thoughts on this, or a good reason why they should be in a class?

-Corey

Nice! The Finance::YahooQuote module is one thing (the only thing?) I missed from Perl! I've condensed your code down into an even shorter version that auto-generates its own functions. All you have to do to add a new field is just update the dictionary that maps long names to short field names. Here you go:

<pre>
#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# Copyright (c) 2007, Corey Goldberg (corey@goldb.org)
#
# license: GNU LGPL
#
# This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
# License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
# version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

# Copyright (c) 2007, Dan Lenski (lenski@umd.edu)
# Made it shorter and more pythonic, I think :)


import urllib
from functools import partial

"""
This is the "ystockquote" module.

This module provides a Python API for retrieving stock data from Yahoo Finance.

sample usage:
>>> import ystockquote
>>> print ystockquote.get_price('GOOG')
529.46
"""

def _request(symbol, stat):
url = 'http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=%s&f=%s' % (symbol, stat)
return urllib.urlopen(url).read().strip().strip('"')

_fields = {
'price': 'l1', 'change': 'c1', 'volume': 'v', 'avg_daily_volume': 'a2',
'stock_exchange': 'x', 'market_cap': 'j1', 'book_value': 'b4',
'ebitda': 'j4', 'dividend_per_share': 'd', 'dividend_yield': 'y',
'earnings_per_share': 'e', '52_week_high': 'k', '52_week_low': 'j',
'50day_moving_avg': 'm3', '200day_moving_avg': 'm4',
'price_earnings_ratio': 'l1', 'price_earnings_growth_ratio': 'r5',
'price_sales_ratio': 'p5', 'price_book_ratio': 'p6', 'short_ratio': 's7'
}

def get_all(symbol):
"""
Get all available quote data for the given ticker symbol.

Returns a dictionary.
"""
longnames, fieldnames = _fields.keys(), _fields.values()
fieldvalues = _request(symbol, ''.join(fieldnames)).split(',')
return dict(zip(longnames, fieldvalues))

_globals = globals()
for _f in _fields:
_globals['get_' + _f] = partial(_request, stat=_fields[_f])
</pre>

I would like recommend a feature where you can request multiple quotes in one HTTP request. Yahoo supports a comma-separated list of tickers in the URL.

A such nice and useful program. However, if I want to retrieve historical data, how can I do it? Thanks a lot.

I sent to an email, Corey. Please check it.

When processing HTML data in python you probably should use Beautiful Soup to get more robust results.
As far as I know it is best library for that purpose.
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

> When processing HTML data in python you probably should
> use Beautiful Soup to get more robust results.

Keep it simple.. I don't actually process any HTML. I make an HTTP request that returns a CSV file of data, which I split and parse.