Company name to ticker using Yahoo Finance API endpoint

ticker.py

def get_ticker(company_name):
    yfinance = "https://query2.finance.yahoo.com/v1/finance/search"
    user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
    params = {"q": company_name, "quotes_count": 1, "country": "United States"}

    res = requests.get(url=yfinance, params=params, headers={'User-Agent': user_agent})
    data = res.json()

    company_code = data['quotes'][0]['symbol']
    return company_code

Given a company's name, this function will return the ticker.

Most tutorials online are to get a company's name from its ticker symbol (for example, supplying MSFT returns "Microsoft"). This function does the opposite operation, where supplying "Microsoft" returns MSFT.

Sample
get_ticker('Texas Instruments')

	Data
Input	Texas Instruments
Output	TXN

As a side note, you can change the user agent as you wish. For information on what that means, see here.

This function is done by making a GET request to the Yahoo! Finance API.

Thanks to @0x4f53 for finding the original endpoint and writing the initial gist.

(My username was changed from "bruhbruhroblox" to "leftmove")

This does not longer work @bruhbruhroblox, do you have any hint on how to make this working again?

@gpetrone84 works for me. get_ticker("Tesla") returns "TSLA". The trick is to make sure your company_name is generic enough. I tried "Tesla Corporation" and it didn't work.

Thank you for this!
I'm currently doing CS50 pset9 Finance. The distribution code only gives the ability to search by Symbol.
I wanted a way to search company name and retrieve the symbol. I tried Alpha Vantage and IEX API but AV would return different symbols and IEX used to work but as of 22 July 2023, started returning random gibberish names.
Using your code, I was able to do what I wanted and this was way cleaner and simpler. Even better, no api key needed for yfinance so I don't need to keep creating new accounts like I did with IEX.

@bruhbruhroblox Good catch! It's really helpful for me as well. I also tried to get ticker symbol from company name using OpenFIGI, FinHub, IEXCloud etc, but couldn't get correct symbols what I wanted to. it returns perfect ones. 👍

@bruhbruhroblox Thank you very much!

Thanks @leftmove

Working

As of 19.04.2025, it is still working. 😊