Retrieving a stock quote using Python?

[Suchandra Thapa]

David Lees <abcdebl2nonspammy at verizon.net> wrote:
> I would like to write a utility in Python that takes a stock symbol as 
> an input and returns a current price.  Suggestions on how to do this are 
> welcome.  I was thinking of an approach that would go out to a page like 
> finance.yahoo.com, entering the stock symbol and then collecting the 
> results and parsing them for the price.  But it has been awhile since I 
> used pythton and I'm not sure I ever really knew how to do this.

Try this little script that retrives stock quotes from MSN:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import urllib2,re

def getQuote(symbol):
"""Get the current price for a given stock ticker symbol"""
    url = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/"
    url += "webquote.dll?ipage=qd&Symbol=%s" % symbol
    urlData = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    quotePage = urlData.read()
    priceRegex = r"Last.*?<TD.*?><B> (\d+.\d+)</B></TD>"
    priceMatch = re.search(priceRegex, quotePage, re.DOTALL)
    price = float(priceMatch.group(1))
    return price

It works now, however if MSN changes their page a lot, it may break.

-- 
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Suchandra Thapa                       
s-thapa-11 at NOSPAMalumni.uchicago.edu  
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