Is there any sort of API that just offers a simple symbol lookup service? i.e., input a company name and it will tell you the ticker symbol? I've tried just screen-scraping Google Finance, but after a little while it rate limits you and you have to enter a CAPTCHA. I'm trying to batch-lookup about 2000 ticker symbols. Any ideas?
11 Answers
Google Finance does let you retrieve up to 100 stock quotes at once using the following URL:
www.google.com/finance/info?infotype=infoquoteall&q=[ticker1],[ticker2],...,[tickern]
For example:
www.google.com/finance/info?infotype=infoquoteall&q=C,JPM,AIG
Someone has deciphered the available fields here:
http://qsb-mac.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Vermilion/Modules/StockQuoter/StockQuoter.py
The current price ("l") is real-time and the delay is on par with Yahoo Finance. There are a few quirks you should be aware of. A handful of stocks require an exchange prefix. For example, if you query "BTIM", you'll get a "Bad Request" error but "AMEX:BTIM" works. A few stocks don't work even with the exchange prefix. For example, querying "FTWRD" and "NASDAQ:FTWRD" both generate "Bad Request" errors even though Google Finance does have information for this NASDAQ stock.
The "el" field, if present, tells you the current pre-market or after-hours price.
You can send an HTTP request to http://finance.yahoo.com requesting symbols, names, quotes, and all sorts of other data. Data is returned as a .CSV so you can request multiple symbols in one query.
So if you send:
http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=MSFT+F+ATT&f=sn
You'll get back something like:
"MSFT","Microsoft Corp"
"F","FORD MOTOR CO"
"ATT","AT&T"
Here is an article called Downloading Yahoo Data which includes the various tags used to request the data.
If you didn't want to sign up for a service, I'd probably go back to the exchanges themselves; most of them aren't CAPTCHAed yet...
The symbol lookup page for:
- NYSE is at http://www.nyse.com/interface/html/SymbolLookup.html
- NASDAQ is at http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/NasdaqSymLookup2.asp?mode=stock
- London Stock Exchange is at http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/pricesnews/prices/Trigger/genericsearch.htm
- ASX is at http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/codeLookup.do
etc...
Google Finance has an API - you probably have to apply for a developers key, but at least you'd save yourself the hassle of screen-scraping: http://code.google.com/apis/finance/reference.html
Your best bets are probably going with one of the other lookup services (still screen-scraping), and checking whether they don't require CAPTCHAs.
The last appears the least likely to require a CAPTCHA at any point, but it's worth checking all three.
Use YQL: a sql-like language to retrieve stuff from public api's: YQL Console (external link)
It gives you a nice XML file to work with!
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