Are there any free APIs for retrieving the S&P 500's component symbols?

Question

Some sort of free REST API would be ideal, but in general is there any free API or web service or CSV file (that's not behind a password prompt) or anything out there that one can query to get the current list of the S&P 500 index constituents?

I've looked on S&P's site itself (http://www.standardandpoors.com), through Yahoo Finance's API, and Markit on demand (http://dev.markitondemand.com/), but have not been able to find anything yet.

Solution 1

I found http://finviz.com/export.ashx?v=152&f=idx_sp500&ft=1&ta=1&p=d&r=1&c=1

:-)

But I haven't found Finviz API documentation.

:-(

Bloomberg seems to have an open api. Might find the data you need if you dig around.

Solution 2

Also had a similar need. You could use Wikipedia API or parse html to get the list of symbols in S&P 500 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

You can now install and use module by

pip install finsymbols

I currently obtain the list of symbols via Wikipedia. It is not rest but can be easily made into a rest API. It is written in python

>>import sys
>>sys.path.append('/home/skillachie/Desktop/')
>>import finsymbols

sp500 = finsymbols.get_sp500_symbols()

pprint.pprint(sp500)

{'company': u'Xcel Energy Inc',
  'headquaters': u'Minneapolis, Minnesota',
  'industry': u'Multi-Utilities & Unregulated Power',
  'sector': u'Utilities',
  'symbol': u'XEL'},
 {'company': u'Xerox Corp.',
  'headquaters': u'Norwalk, Connecticut',
  'industry': u'IT Consulting & Services',
  'sector': u'Information Technology',
  'symbol': u'XRX'},
 {'company': u'Xilinx Inc',
  'headquaters': u'San Jose, California',
  'industry': u'Semiconductors',
  'sector': u'Information Technology',
  'symbol': u'XLNX'},
 {'company': u'XL Capital',
  'headquaters': u'Hamilton, Bermuda',
  'industry': u'Property & Casualty Insurance',
  'sector': u'Financials',
  'symbol': u'XL'},

If interested you can get more information here http://skillachie.github.io/finsymbols/

Solution 3

with python, you can try out this snippet i just wrote (a bit ugly, but that works). (it actually returns 502 tickers. and it is right)

 from urllib import request
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    import datetime
    import dateutil.relativedelta as dr
    import pandas as pd


    def get_constituents():
        # URL request, URL opener, read content
        req = request.Request('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies')
        opener = request.urlopen(req)
        content = opener.read().decode() # Convert bytes to UTF-8

        soup = BeautifulSoup(content)
        tables = soup.find_all('table') # HTML table we actually need is tables[0] 

        external_class = tables[0].findAll('a', {'class':'external text'})

        tickers = []

        for ext in external_class:
            if not 'reports' in ext:
                tickers.append(ext.string)

        return tickers