Web scraping of key stats in Yahoo! Finance with R - 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 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

Answer 2

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 3

When I use the methods shown here with XML library, I get a Warning
Warning in readLines(page) : incomplete final line found on
'https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DIS/key-statistics?p=DIS'
We can use rvest and xml2 for a cleaner approach. This example demonstrates how to pull a key statistic from the key-statistics Yahoo! Finance page. Here I want to obtain the float of an equity. I don't believe float is available from quantmod, but some of the key stats values are. You'll have to reference the list.
library(xml2)
library(rvest)
getFloat <- function(stock){
url <- paste0("https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/", stock, "/key-statistics?p=", stock)
tables <- read_html(url) %>%
html_nodes("table") %>%
html_table()
float <- as.vector(tables[[3]][4,2])
last <- substr(float, nchar(float)-1+1, nchar(float))
float <-gsub("[a-zA-Z]", "", float)
float <- as.numeric(as.character(float))
if(last == "k"){
float <- float * 1000
} else if (last == "M") {
float <- float * 1000000
} else if (last == "B") {
float <- float * 1000000000
}
return(float)
}
getFloat("DIS")
[1] 1.81e+09
That's a lot of shares of Disney available.