I'm quite new to programming in Python.
I want to make an application which will fetch stock prices from google finance. One example is CSCO (Cisco Sytems). I would then use that data to warn the user when the stock reaches a certain value. It also needs to refresh every 30 seconds.
The problem is I dont have a clue how to fetch the data!
Anyone have any ideas?
This module comes courtesy of Corey Goldberg.
Program:
import urllib
import re
def get_quote(symbol):
base_url = 'http://finance.google.com/finance?q='
content = urllib.urlopen(base_url + symbol).read()
m = re.search('id="ref_694653_l".*?>(.*?)<', content)
if m:
quote = m.group(1)
else:
quote = 'no quote available for: ' + symbol
return quote
Sample Usage:
import stockquote
print stockquote.get_quote('goog')
Update: Changed the regular expression to match Google Finance's latest format (as of 23-Feb-2011). This demonstrates the main issue when relying upon screen scraping.