stock quotes off the web, py style

[Friedrich Rentsch]

On 05/16/2018 02:23 AM, Mike McClain wrote:
>      Initially I got my quotes from a broker daily to plug into a
> spreadsheet, Then I found Yahoo and wrote a perl script to grab them.
> When Yahoo quit supplying quotes I found AlphaVantage.co and rewrote
> the perl script.
>      AlphaVantage.co has been down since last week and I found
> iextrading.com has a freely available interface. Since it needs
> a rewrite and I'm trying to get a handle on python this seems
> like a good opportunity to explore.
>      If someone would please suggest modules to explore. Are there any
> upper level modules that would allow me to do something like:
>
> from module import get
> def getAquote(symbol):
>      url = 'https://api.iextrading.com/1.0/stock/()/quote'.format(symbol)
>      reply = module.get(url)
>      return my_parse(reply)
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
> --
> Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
> themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
>      - Churchill

I didn't know the site you mention. I've been getting quotes from Yahoo 
daily. The service they discontinued was for up to 50 symbols per page. 
I now parse a separate page of some 500K of html for each symbol! This 
site is certainly more concise and surely a lot faster. It serves a 
naked set of data, which happens to conform to the python source code 
specification for dictionaries and consequently can be compiled into a 
dictionary with 'eval', like so:

 >>> ibm = urllib2.urlopen 
("https://api.iextrading.com/1.0/stock/IBM/quote").read()
 >>> ibm = eval (ibm)
 >>> for item in sorted (ibm.items()): print '%-24s%s' % item

avgTotalVolume          5331869
calculationPrice        close
change                  -0.56
changePercent           -0.00388
close                   143.74
closeTime               1526414517398
companyName             International Business Machines Corporation
delayedPrice            143.74
delayedPriceTime        1526414517398
high                    143.99
iexAskPrice             0
iexAskSize              0
iexBidPrice             0
iexBidSize              0
iexLastUpdated          0
iexMarketPercent        0
iexRealtimePrice        0
iexRealtimeSize         0
iexVolume               0
latestPrice             143.74
latestSource            Close
latestTime              May 15, 2018
latestUpdate            1526414517398
latestVolume            4085996
low                     142.92
marketCap               131948764304
open                    143.5
openTime                1526391000646
peRatio                 10.34
previousClose           144.3
primaryExchange         New York Stock Exchange
sector                  Technology
symbol                  IBM
week52High              171.13
week52Low               139.13
ytdChange               -0.0485148849103

You would do multiple symbols in a loop which you enter with an open 
urllib object, rather than opening a new one for each symbol inside the 
loop.

Frederic