"webread" does not work for Yahoo Option Chains page

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Going to any Yahoo Option Chain page, copy and paste the URL to webread returns an error. For example:
webread('https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/options/')
returns
The server returned the status 404 with message "Not Found"
It works for stock prices, but not for option chains. Is this a Yahoo protection issue or a limitation of webread?
  4 Comments
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 6 Aug 2024
Access blocks would typically be error 403, Access Prohibitted.
Adriano
Adriano on 31 Oct 2024
Moved: Walter Roberson on 31 Oct 2024
I get this error message:
Error: The server returned the status 404 with message "Not Found" in response to the request to URL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/options/.

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Answers (1)

Kanishk
Kanishk on 13 Aug 2024
Hi Cengiz,
It seems that when trying to use ‘webread’ to access the Yahoo Finance options page ‘404 Not Found’ error is encountered.
The issue appears to be related to the "User-Agent" field in the HTTP request. Some servers, including Yahoo Finance, selectively block requests from certain clients if the "User-Agent" field is not set or is set to an unrecognized value.
Although the field is not mandatory in HTTP requests, to resolve this issue, you can specify the "User-Agent" in the ‘webread’ request to mimic a web browser using ‘weboptions.
Please follow the below code snippet to resolve the error:
url = 'https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/options';
% Set the web options with a User-Agent to mimic a web browser
options = weboptions('UserAgent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3');
try
data = webread(url, options);
% Save retrieved page in HTML file
fid = fopen('AAPLOptions.html','w');
fprintf(fid, '%s\n',data);
fclose(fid);
catch err
disp(['Error: ', err.message]);
end
I was able to resolve the above error following the above steps.
The ‘User-Agent’ property of your browser can be found here
Please go through the following documentation pages to learn more about webread and weboptions:
Hope this helps!
Thanks
Kanishk

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