Getting a list of stock symbols with Python

Lists of stock symbols can be found at either of these links:


You can download a list of symbols from the nasdaq.com site for the Nasdaq, NYSE, and AMEX exchanges.

The FTP directory at ftp.nasdaqtrader.com gets updated every night at 3:00AM (symbols can change). Here is a quick Python script to download the nasdaqlisted.txt and otherlisted.txt files from the ftp site:


#!/usr/bin/python

 # typical use: python get_symbols.py > symbols.txt

 import urllib

 def get_data( url ):
    data = urllib.urlopen( url )
    lines = []
    for line in data:
        lines.append( line.rstrip().split('|') )
    return lines
url = 'ftp://ftp.nasdaqtrader.com/SymbolDirectory/'
files = ['nasdaqlisted.txt', 'otherlisted.txt']

 for f in files:
    print get_data( url + f )


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