Version: 1.0, 20130219

Author: David Prager Branner

To explore web scraping using the headline news service on (finance.yahoo.com).

stockscrape.py: Version for Python 3.2 only.

OUTPUT/: where output file, stock_report.tex is saved. Note that this file needs to be compiled with LaTeX in order to be usable. The LaTeX output file stock_report.pdf will normally be found here as well.

CODE/: contains .tex templates for beginning and end of output file.

DATA/: contains .txt file of stock tickers to be looked up, one per line.

PREVIOUS_VERSIONS/: previous versions will be stored here with date appended, but they may not run as is because directory structures have changed. See past commits of the repository for complete working installations of these older versions.

Output contains first a table of stock prices and related data, from the Yahoo API, followed by a list of recent headlines for each stock ticker. The LaTeX package longtable is used, to allow breaking of tables across pages if they exceed the amount of available space on the first page.

This version scrapes the Yahoo financial news site using Beautiful Soup 4.

1. Main file now named stockscrape.py, rather than stockscrape32.py.
2. Program uses Beautiful Soup 4 for scraping.
3. Small improvements to LaTeX escaping and column widths in initial table.
4. Print statements for debugging have been commented out.

Past versions:

• 0.4, 20130214
• 0.3, 20130213
• 0.2, 20130213
• 0.1, 20130212