Web scraping of key stats in Yahoo! Finance with R

Question

Is anyone experienced in scraping data from the Yahoo! Finance key statistics page with R? I am familiar scraping data directly from html using read_html, html_nodes(), and html_text() from rvest package. However, this web page MSFT key stats is a bit complicated, I am not sure if all the stats are kept in XHR, JS, or Doc. I am guessing the data is stored in JSON. If anyone knows a good way to extract and parse data for this web page with R, kindly answer my question, great thanks in advance!

Or if there is a more convenient way to extract these metrics via quantmod or Quandl, kindly let me know, that would be a extremely good solution!

Answer 1

I gave up on Excel a long time ago. R is definitely the way to go for things like this.

library(XML)

stocks <- c("AXP","BA","CAT","CSCO")

for (s in stocks) {
      url <- paste0("http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=", s)
      webpage <- readLines(url)
      html <- htmlTreeParse(webpage, useInternalNodes = TRUE, asText = TRUE)
      tableNodes <- getNodeSet(html, "//table")

      # ASSIGN TO STOCK NAMED DFS
      assign(s, readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[9]], 
                header= c("data1", "data2", "data3", "data4", "data5", "data6",
                          "data7", "data8", "data9", "data10", "data11", "data12")))

      # ADD COLUMN TO IDENTIFY STOCK 
      df <- get(s)
      df['stock'] <- s
      assign(s, df)
}

# COMBINE ALL STOCK DATA 
stockdatalist <- cbind(mget(stocks))
stockdata <- do.call(rbind, stockdatalist)
# MOVE STOCK ID TO FIRST COLUMN
stockdata <- stockdata[, c(ncol(stockdata), 1:ncol(stockdata)-1)]

# SAVE TO CSV
write.table(stockdata, "C:/Users/your_path_here/Desktop/MyData.csv", sep=",", 
            row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)

# REMOVE TEMP OBJECTS
rm(df, stockdatalist)

Answer 2

I know this is an older thread, but I used it to scrape Yahoo Analyst tables so I figure I would share.

# Yahoo webscrape Analysts
library(XML)

symbol = "HD"
url <- paste('https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HD/analysts?p=',symbol,sep="")
webpage <- readLines(url)
html <- htmlTreeParse(webpage, useInternalNodes = TRUE, asText = TRUE)
tableNodes <- getNodeSet(html, "//table")

earningEstimates <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[1]])
revenueEstimates <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[2]])
earningHistory <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[3]])
epsTrend <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[4]])
epsRevisions <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[5]])
growthEst <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[6]])

Cheers, Sody