19Jan 2019 by Andrew Treadway
Scraping data from a JavaScript webpage with Python

Scraping data from a JavaScript webpage with Python

Python, Web Scraping
This post will walk through how to use the requests_html package to scrape options data from a JavaScript-rendered webpage. requests_html serves as an alternative to Selenium and PhantomJS, and provides a clear syntax similar to the awesome requests package. The code we'll walk through is packaged into functions in the options module in the yahoo_fin package, but this article will show how to write the code from scratch using requests_html so that you can use the same idea to scrape other JavaScript-rendered webpages. Note: requests_html requires Python 3.6+. If you don't have requests_html installed, you can download it using pip: [cc] pip install requests_html [/cc] Motivation Let's say we want to scrape options data for a particular stock. As an example, let's look at Netflix (since it's well known). If…
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31Jul 2018 by Andrew Treadway

How to get live stock prices with Python

Python, Web Scraping
In a previous post, I gave an introduction to the yahoo_fin package. The most updated version of the package includes new functionality allowing you to scrape live stock prices from Yahoo Finance (real-time). In this article, we'll go through a couple ways of getting real-time data from Yahoo Finance for stocks, as well as how to pull cryptocurrency price information. The get_live_price function First, we just need to load the stock_info module from yahoo_fin. Then, obtaining the current price of a stock is as simple as one line of code: Note: Passing tickers is not case-sensitive (upper / lower / mixed doesn't matter). Getting live price with other quote data The live stock price has also been added to the get_quote_table function, which pulls in additional information about the current…
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16Jul 2018 by Andrew Treadway
How to download image files with RoboBrowser

How to download image files with RoboBrowser

Python, Web Scraping
In a previous post, we showed how RoboBrowser can be used to fill out online forms for getting historical weather data from Wunderground. This article will talk about how to use RoboBrowser to batch download collections of image files from Pexels, a site which offers free downloads. If you're looking to work with images, or want to build a training set for an image classifier with Python, this post will help you do that. In the first part of the code, we'll load the RoboBrowser class from the robobrowser package, create a browser object which acts like a web browser, and navigate to the Pexels website. If you actually go to the website, you'll see there's a search box. We can identify this search form using the get_form method. Once…
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25Jan 2018 by Andrew Treadway
Coding with the Yahoo_fin Package

Coding with the Yahoo_fin Package

Python, Web Scraping
Background on yahoo_fin The yahoo_fin package contains functions to scrape stock-related data from Yahoo Finance and NASDAQ. You can view the official documentation by clicking this link, but the below post will provide a few more in-depth examples. Also, please check out my yahoo_fin playlist on YouTube. The first video is below, which covers installation and getting historical / real-time stock prices. The functions in yahoo_fin are divided into two modules, stock_info and options. This post will focus on introducing stock_info. For more on using the options module, check out this post. Let's get started by importing the stock_info module from yahoo_fin. Downloading price data One of the core functions available is called get_data, which retrieves historical price data for an individual stock. To call this function, just pass whatever…
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12Oct 2017 by Andrew Treadway
Word Frequency Analysis

Word Frequency Analysis

Python, Web Scraping
In a previous article, we talked about using Python to scrape stock-related articles from the web. As an extension of this idea, we’re going to show you how to use the NLTK package to figure out how often different words occur in text, using scraped stock articles. Initial Setup Let's import the NLTK package, along with requests and BeautifulSoup, which we'll need to scrape the stock articles. Pulling the data we'll need Below, we're copying code from my scraping stocks article. This gives us a function, scrape_all_articles (along with two other helper functions), which we can use to pull the actual raw text from articles linked to from NASDAQ's website. Let's run our function to pull a few articles on Netflix (ticker symbol 'NFLX'). Above, we use our function to…
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19Sep 2017 by Andrew Treadway
RoboBrowser: Automating Online Forms

RoboBrowser: Automating Online Forms

Python, Web Scraping
Background RoboBrowser is a Python 3.x package for crawling through the web and submitting online forms. It works similarly to the older Python 2.x package, mechanize. This post is going to give a simple introduction using RoboBrowser to submit a form on Wunderground for scraping historical weather data. Initial setup RoboBrowser can be installed via pip: Let's do the initial setup of the script by loading the RoboBrowser package. We'll also load pandas, as we'll be using that a little bit later. Create RoboBrowser Object Next, we create a RoboBrowser object. This object functions similarly to an actual web browser. It allows you to navigate to different websites, fill in forms, and get HTML from webpages. All of a RoboBrowser object's actions are completely invisible, so you won't actually see…
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24Aug 2017 by Andrew Treadway
Scraping Articles About Stocks

Scraping Articles About Stocks

Python, Web Scraping
See recommended books here. The following article will show you an example of how to scrape articles about stocks from the Web using Python 3.  Specifically, we'll be looking at articles linked from http://www.nasdaq.com. If you're not familiar with list comprehensions, you may want to check this, as we'll be using them in our code. Initial, Specific Example Let's start with a specific stock -- say, Netflix, for example.  Articles linked to a specific stock ticker from Nasdaq's website have the following pattern: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/TICKER/news-headlines, where TICKER is replaced with whatever ticker you want.  In our case, we will start by dealing specifically with Netflix's (NFLX) stock.  So our site of interest is: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nflx/news-headlines The first step is to load the requests and BeautifulSoup packages.  Here, we'll also set the variable site equal to…
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