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

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. 😊