A common tool for data analysis is gathering the data from a public source such as a website. Python is adept at scraping websites for data. Here, we look at an example that loads stock price information from Google Finance data.
In particular, given a stock symbol, we want to retrieve the last year of price ranges for that symbol.
One of the pages on the Google Finance site will give the last years' worth of price data for a security company. For example, if we were interested in the price points for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), we would enter the following URL:
https://www.google.com/finance/historical?q=NASDAQ:AMD
Here, NASDAQ is the stock exchange that carries the AMD security. On the resultant Google page, there is a table of data points of interest, as seen in the following partial screenshot.
Like many sites that you will be attempting to access, there is a lot of other information on the page as well, like headers and footers and ads, as you can see...
