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How to Build a Real-Time Taiwan Stock Scraper in 50 Lines of Python

#python #webscraping #automation #beginners

Finding reliable, real-time stock data for the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) can be a pain. The official API is clunky, and paid services are expensive.

But what if I told you that you can build your own scraper in less than 5 minutes using Python?

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to extract real-time price, percentage change, and stock names directly from Yahoo Finance TW using requests and BeautifulSoup.

Prerequisites

You'll need Python installed and two libraries:

bash
pip install requests beautifulsoup4
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The Code

Here is the complete, working script. No fluff.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time

def get_stock_price(symbol):
    # Target URL: Yahoo Finance TW
    url = f"https://tw.stock.yahoo.com/quote/%7Bsymbol%7D.TW"
We need to look like a real browser
    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36"
    }

    try:
        response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

Yahoo TW uses meta tags for SEO
        price = soup.find("meta", {"itemprop": "price"})["content"]
        name = soup.find("h1").text.strip()
        change = soup.find("meta", {"itemprop": "priceChange"})["content"]

        return {
            "Symbol": symbol,
"Name": name,
            "Price": price,
            "Change": change
        }
    except Exception as e:
        return {"Error": str(e)}

if name == "main":
    # Example: TSMC (2330)
    target = "2330"
    print(f"Fetching data for {target}...")
    data = get_stock_price(target)
    print(data)
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Why This Works

  1. Fake User-Agent: We send a browser-like header so Yahoo doesn't block our script.
  2. Meta Tags: Instead of relying on fragile CSS classes (which Yahoo changes often), we scrape the itemprop meta tags. These are much more stable.
  3. JSON Output: The function returns a clean dictionary, ready to be saved to Excel or sent to a database.

Taking It Further

This script is great for a quick check, but for a production-grade bot, you'll need:

  • Proxy Rotation: To avoid getting IP banned after 100 requests.
  • AsyncIO: To scrape 1000+ stocks in seconds, not minutes.
  • Database Integration: To store historical data for analysis.

Need a Custom Solution?

I build robust, high-performance web scrapers and automation bots for a living.

If you need a custom tool—like a Line Notification Bot that alerts you when TSMC hits a certain price, or a Daily PTT Sentiment Analyzer—I can build it for you.
👉 Hire me on Fiverr (PyFlowMaster)

Let's automate your workflow today!

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