Web Scraping Code to extract stock price

Question

I am creating a web scrapping python code (using 2.7.11) that extracts the stock price using symbol. I am not sure why this is not working. But it gives me this output:

Answer 1

You should not be using str.find to parse a webpage, you should use an html parser like bs4 but in this case there is an api that you can requests the data from in json format, combining with requests makes it pretty trivial to get the data.

In [25]: import  requests

In [26]: sym = "DVN"    
In [27]: r = requests.get("http://finance.yahoo.com/webservice/v1/symbols/{sym}/quote?format=json".format(sym=sym)) 
In [28]: r.json()
Out[28]: 
{'list': {'meta': {'count': 1, 'start': 0, 'type': 'resource-list'},
  'resources': [{'resource': {'classname': 'Quote',
     'fields': {'name': 'Devon Energy Corporation Common',
      'price': '18.650000',
      'symbol': 'DVN',
      'ts': '1455915714',
      'type': 'equity',
      'utctime': '2016-02-19T21:01:54+0000',
      'volume': '33916489'}}}]}}

In [29]: sym = "YHOO"
In [30]: r = requests.get("http://finance.yahoo.com/webservice/v1/symbols/{sym}/quote?format=json".format(sym=sym))
In [31]: r.json()
Out[31]: 
{'list': {'meta': {'count': 1, 'start': 0, 'type': 'resource-list'},
  'resources': [{'resource': {'classname': 'Quote',
     'fields': {'name': 'Yahoo! Inc.',
      'price': '30.040001',
      'symbol': 'YHOO',
      'ts': '1455915600',
      'type': 'equity',
      'utctime': '2016-02-19T21:00:00+0000',
      'volume': '20734985'}}}]}}

In [32]: sym = "AAPL"
In [33]: r = requests.get("http://finance.yahoo.com/webservice/v1/symbols/{sym}/quote?format=json".format(sym=sym))
In [34]: r.json()
Out[34]: 
{'list': {'meta': {'count': 1, 'start': 0, 'type': 'resource-list'},
  'resources': [{'resource': {'classname': 'Quote',
     'fields': {'name': 'Apple Inc.',
      'price': '96.040001',
      'symbol': 'AAPL',
      'ts': '1455915600',
      'type': 'equity',
      'utctime': '2016-02-19T21:00:00+0000',
      'volume': '35374173'}}}]}}

You can pull whatever data you want using accessing by key which is a lot more robust than str.find.