Programmatically look up a ticker symbol in R - r

Question

I have a field of data containing company names, such as
company <- c("Microsoft", "Apple", "Cloudera", "Ford")
> company
Company
1 Microsoft
2 Apple
3 Cloudera
4 Ford
and so on.
The package tm.plugin.webmining allows you to query data from Yahoo! Finance based on ticker symbols:
require(tm.plugin.webmining)
results <- WebCorpus(YahooFinanceSource("MSFT"))
I'm missing the in-between step. How can I query ticket symbols programmatically based on company names?

Answer 1

I couldn't manage to do this with the tm.plugin.webmining package, but I came up with a rough solution - pulling & parsing data from this web file: ftp://ftp.nasdaqtrader.com/SymbolDirectory/nasdaqlisted.txt. I say rough because for some reason my calls with httr::content(httr::GET(...)) don't work every time - I think it has to do with the type of web address (ftp://) but I don't do that much web scraping so I can't really explain this. It seemed to work better on my Linux than my Mac, but that could be irrelevant. Regardless, here's what I got: Thanks to #thelatemail's comment, this seems to be working much smoother:
library(quantmod) ## optional
symbolData <- read.csv(
"ftp://ftp.nasdaqtrader.com/SymbolDirectory/nasdaqlisted.txt",
sep="|")
##
> head(symbolData,10)
Symbol Security.Name Market.Category Test.Issue Financial.Status Round.Lot.Size
1 AAIT iShares MSCI All Country Asia Information Technology Index Fund G N N 100
2 AAL American Airlines Group, Inc. - Common Stock Q N N 100
3 AAME Atlantic American Corporation - Common Stock G N N 100
4 AAOI Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. - Common Stock G N N 100
5 AAON AAON, Inc. - Common Stock Q N N 100
6 AAPL Apple Inc. - Common Stock Q N N 100
7 AAVL Avalanche Biotechnologies, Inc. - Common Stock G N N 100
8 AAWW Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings - Common Stock Q N N 100
9 AAXJ iShares MSCI All Country Asia ex Japan Index Fund G N N 100
10 ABAC Aoxin Tianli Group, Inc. - Common Shares S N N 100
Edit:
As per #GSee's suggestion, a (presumably) more robust way to obtain the source data is with the stockSymbols() function in the package TTR:
> symbolData2 <- stockSymbols(exchange="NASDAQ")
Fetching NASDAQ symbols...
> ##
> head(symbolData2)
Symbol Name LastSale MarketCap IPOyear Sector
1 AAIT iShares MSCI All Country Asia Information Technology Index Fun 34.556 6911200 NA <NA>
2 AAL American Airlines Group, Inc. 40.500 29164164453 NA Transportation
3 AAME Atlantic American Corporation 4.020 83238028 NA Finance
4 AAOI Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. 20.510 303653114 2013 Technology
5 AAON AAON, Inc. 18.420 1013324613 NA Capital Goods
6 AAPL Apple Inc. 103.300 618546661100 1980 Technology
Industry Exchange
1 <NA> NASDAQ
2 Air Freight/Delivery Services NASDAQ
3 Life Insurance NASDAQ
4 Semiconductors NASDAQ
5 Industrial Machinery/Components NASDAQ
6 Computer Manufacturing NASDAQ
I don't know if you just wanted to get ticker symbols from names, but if you are also looking for actual share price information you could do something like this:
namedStock <- function(name="Microsoft",
start=Sys.Date()-365,
end=Sys.Date()-1){
ticker <- symbolData[agrep(name,symbolData[,2]),1]
getSymbols(
Symbols=ticker,
src="yahoo",
env=.GlobalEnv,
from=start,to=end)
}
##
## an xts object named MSFT will be added to
## the global environment, no need to assign
## to an object
namedStock()
##
> str(MSFT)
An ‘xts’ object on 2013-09-03/2014-08-29 containing:
Data: num [1:251, 1:6] 31.8 31.4 31.1 31.3 31.2 ...
- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2
..$ : NULL
..$ : chr [1:6] "MSFT.Open" "MSFT.High" "MSFT.Low" "MSFT.Close" ...
Indexed by objects of class: [Date] TZ: UTC
xts Attributes:
List of 2
$ src : chr "yahoo"
$ updated: POSIXct[1:1], format: "2014-09-02 21:51:22.792"
> chartSeries(MSFT)
So like I said, this isn't the cleanest solution but hopefully it helps you out. Also note that my data source was pulling companies traded on NASDAQ (which is most major companies), but you could easily combine this with other sources.