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

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

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)

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!