Formatting Stock Data from Yahoo Finance

Yesterday I was playing with manipulating information pulled from stocks.  I ended up pulling data from Yahoo Finance, because it is just so easy to do in PHP.  I ran into a problem, how would I pull all the data I needed?

I found very little documentation online, it seems that pulling data from Yahoo Finance is more of a clever manipulation of Yahoo offering CSV downloads of financial data.  Yahoo mentions on discussion boards that it does not support, or help, those who use Yahoo Finance like this.  I don’t believe it is against any agreements.

The Setup

Pulling data is easy enough.  Examples here will be in PHP but it can be done in any language of course.

Yahoo’s finance URL is:

http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv

That will get you a CSV (comma separated values) result.  You can query multiple stock symbols, they are returned on different lines.

Some basic PHP code to get you up and running:

// Setup Variables
$stockList = "GOOG,YHOO,T,AAPL";
$stockFormat = "snl1d1t1c1hgw";
$host = "http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv";
$requestUrl = $host."?s=".$stockList."&f=".$stockFormat."&e=.csv";

// Pull data (download CSV as file)
$filesize=2000;
$handle = fopen($requestUrl, "r");
$raw = fread($handle, $filesize);
fclose($handle);

// Split results, trim way the extra line break at the end
$quotes = explode("\n",trim($raw));

foreach($quotes as $quoteraw) {
$quoteraw = str_replace(", I", " I", $quoteraw);
$quote = explode(",", $quoteraw);

echo $quote[0]."
"; // output the first element of the array, the Company Name
}

As you can see, it is very easy.  Some interesting parts of the sample:

• Line 3 – You can change the stockFormat just like a date format to pull different values.  The list of options is at the end of this post
• Line 9 – This is being handled like a file download
• Line 14 – I trim the results before splitting by lines, because I always have an extra line break at the end
• Line 17 – One HUGE problem with this, is it may contain commas.  There is probably an easy regular expression to write, but for my purposes doing the replace on the “, Inc.” was enough for me.  I had 2 companies whose name included a comma, so I just filter that out so we don’t break the array indexes.  In doing searches online people complain that this is a problem, it really isn’t with a little more than basic parsing.
• Line 20 – Our final result, of course you can display whichever field you want.  Below you will see what fields are being pulled

Yahoo Finance CSV Formatting Options

On the example above you can see on line 3, that we set the format to be returned.  It is just like working with date and their formatting.  Below is a list of options I finally found after scouring the web (Yahoo documentation does NOT help with this):

• s – Symbol
• n – Name
• l – Last Trade (with time)
• l1 – Last Trade (without time)
• d1 – Last Trade Date
• t1 – Last Trade Time
• k3 – Last Trade Size
• c – Change and Percent Change
• c1 – Change
• p2 – Change in Percent
• t7 – Ticker Trend
• v – Volume
• a2 – Average Daily Volume
• i – More Info
• t6 – Trade Links
• b – Bid
• b6 – Bid Size
• a – Ask
• a5 – Ask Size
• p – Previous Close
• o – Open
• m – Day’s Range
• w – 52 Week Range
• j5 – Change from 52 Week Low
• j6 – Percent Change from 52 Week Low
• k4 – Change from 52 Week High
• k5 – Percent Change from 52 Week High
• e – Earnings/Share
• r – P/E Ratio
• s7 – Short Ratio
• r1 – Dividend Pay Date
• q – Ex-Dividend Date
• d – Dividend/Share
• y – Dividend Yield
• f6 – Float Shares
• j1 – Market Capitalization
• t8 – 1 Year Target Price
• e7 – EPS Est. Current Year
• e8 – EPS Est. Next Year
• e9 – EPS Est. Next Quarter
• r6 – Price/EPS Est. Current Year
• r7 – Price/EPS Est. Next Year
• r5 – PEG Ratio
• b4 – Book Value
• p6 – Price/Book
• p5 – Price/Sales
• j4 – EBITDA
• m3 – 50 Day Moving Average
• m7 – Change from 50 Day Moving Average
• m8 – Percent Change from 50 Day Moving Average
• m4 – 200 Day Moving Average
• m5 – Change from 200 Day Moving Average
• m6 – Percent Change from 200 Day Moving Average
• s1 – Shares Owned
• p1 – Price Paid
• c3 – Commission
• v1 – Holdings Value
• w1 – Day’s Value Change
• g1 – Holdings Gain Percent
• g4 – Holdings Gain
• d2 – Trade Date
• g3 – Annualized Gain
• l2 – High Limit
• l3 – Low Limit
• n4 – Notes
• k1 – Last Trade (Real-time) with Time
• b3 – Bid (Real-time)
• b2 – Ask (Real-time)
• k2 – Change Percent (Real-time)
• c6 – Change (Real-time)
• v7 – Holdings Value (Real-time)
• w4 – Day’s Value Change (Real-time)
• g5 – Holdings Gain Percent (Real-time)
• g6 – Holdings Gain (Real-time)
• m2 – Day’s Range (Real-time)
• j3 – Market Cap (Real-time)
• r2 – P/E (Real-time)
• c8 – After Hours Change (Real-time)
• i5 – Order Book (Real-time)
• x – Stock Exchange

If you look at our original format string:

snl1d1t1c1w

You can see that it will return, in this order, the following values per stock queried:

1. Symbol
2. Name
3. Last Trade (Price Only)
4. Last Trade Date
5. Last Trade Time
6. Change
7. 52-Week Range

Tags: CSV, format, Formatting, PHP, Quotes, Stock, Yahoo Finance

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