Write a program to print the latest share value of a company whose NASDAQ symbol would be provided in the command line.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2
import sys
# a function share_price is defined to get the latest share value of a company
def share_price(nasdaqsym):
#the link to the finance site is made abd the data is stored in the instance "share_value"
share_value = urllib2.urlopen('http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s='+nasdaqsym+'&f=l1')
#The share price is printed
print "Latest share price of company with NASDAQ symbol "+nasdaqsym+" : " +share_value.read()
if __name__ == '__main__':
#Checking included whether we have one Symbol in the command line or not as per the syntax "./sharevalue .py [NASDAQ symbol]
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
share_price(sys.argv[1])
else:
print "Give only one NASDAQ symbol at a time after command line argument!"
sys.exit(0)
For the above stated problem, to obtain the latest share value of a company using the company's NASDAQ symbol, the function urlopen() of the module urllib2 has been used. It takes the link of the website finance.yahoo.com as input and returns the latest share value(specified by the sybmol f=l1 in the link) of the company which is stored in the instance share_value. Then in '__main__', a checking is included which checks whether there is only one input symbol given after the command line input i.e ./sharevalue.py.
The Link to the original code is given in sharevalue.py.