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How to scrape real-time stock prices from a financial website?
Scraping real-time stock prices requires understanding the structure of the website and how it updates its data. Many financial websites use JavaScript to refresh stock prices dynamically, making it necessary to use tools like Selenium, Puppeteer, or Playwright to capture these updates. Some websites expose stock price data through APIs, which is a more reliable and faster option. For sites without APIs, you can monitor network traffic in the browser developer tools to identify AJAX calls that provide stock data in JSON format. This approach allows you to bypass rendering the entire webpage and directly fetch the data.
Here’s an example using Selenium to scrape dynamically loaded stock prices:from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By import time driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get("https://example.com/stocks") time.sleep(5) # Wait for the page to load completely stocks = driver.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, "stock-item") for stock in stocks: name = stock.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "stock-name").text price = stock.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "stock-price").text print(f"Stock: {name}, Price: {price}") driver.quit()Efficiently scraping stock prices also involves adding error handling to deal with dynamic changes on the website. Additionally, it’s important to respect the website’s terms of service to avoid being blocked. Have you ever faced challenges when scraping real-time data, and how did you address them?
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3 Replies
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One challenge I’ve faced is handling frequent page updates. Using tools like Selenium with short delays helps capture the most recent data accurately without overwhelming the website.
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For sites with APIs, I prefer using those instead of scraping the page. APIs are faster, more reliable, and don’t require managing HTML or handling dynamic JavaScript.
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Sometimes, stock data is hidden in WebSocket responses. Monitoring network traffic in the browser can reveal the WebSocket connections and the data they transmit.
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