API for Stock Market Data

Devon I would suggest visiting http://www.jarloo.com/yahoo_finance/ .

Based on the article the Yahoo Finance API is rest based. Meaning you make a call to the base string http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv followed by the query string ?s=<query>&f=<financial data>. Where <query> is the stock symbol you're looking to perform a lookup against and <financial data> would refer to the financial data you're seeking ie name, pricing, dividends, date etc. This same article includes a table of all the financial data you can retrieve.

The example URL in the article used http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=AAPL+GOOG+MSFT&f=nab would retrieve the name, ask, and bid for the stock symbols APPL, GOOG, and MSFT in CSV format.

Additionally I would check out http://www.jarloo.com/get-yahoo-finance-api-data-via-yql/ to learn how to get data in XML or JSON as opposed to CSV. Note that the base string here is a bit different http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q= <YQL Statement>&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys . Where <YQL Statement> is based on Yahoo's Query Language. In the example in the article, the statement used to query the symbol AAPL stock information is select * from yahoo.finance.stocks where symbol=”aapl” .

Lastly, by default the URL http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q= <YQL Statement>&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys would return XML unless you add &format=json into the URL. Hope this betters your understanding of the Yahoo Finance API.