How to get a complete list of ticker symbols from Yahoo Finance?

There is a nice C# wrapper for the Yahoo.Finance API at http://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-managed/ that will get you there. Unfortunately there is no direct way to download the ticker list but the following creates the list by iterating through the alphabetical groups:

        AlphabeticIDIndexDownload dl1 = new AlphabeticIDIndexDownload();
        dl1.Settings.TopIndex = null;
        Response<AlphabeticIDIndexResult> resp1 = dl1.Download();

        writeStream.WriteLine("Id|Isin|Name|Exchange|Type|Industry");

        foreach (var alphabeticalIndex in resp1.Result.Items)
        {
            AlphabeticalTopIndex topIndex = (AlphabeticalTopIndex) alphabeticalIndex;
            dl1.Settings.TopIndex = topIndex;
            Response<AlphabeticIDIndexResult> resp2 = dl1.Download();

            foreach (var index in resp2.Result.Items)
            {
                IDSearchDownload dl2 = new IDSearchDownload();
                Response<IDSearchResult> resp3 = dl2.Download(index);


                int i = 0;
                foreach (var item in resp3.Result.Items)
                {
                    writeStream.WriteLine(item.ID + "|" + item.ISIN + "|" + item.Name + "|" + item.Exchange + "|" + item.Type + "|" + item.Industry);
                }

            }
        }

It gave me a list of about 75,000 securities in about 4 mins.

i had a similar problem. yahoo doesn't offer it, but you can get one by looking through the document.write statements on nyse.com's list and finding the .js file where they just happen to store the list of companies starting with the given letter as a js array literal. you can also get nice tidy csv files from nasdaq.com here: http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-name.aspx?letter=0&exchange=nasdaq&render=download (replace exchange=nasdaq with exchange=nyse for nyse symbols).

NASDAQ Stock lists ftp://ftp.nasdaqtrader.com/symboldirectory

The 2 files nasdaqlisted.txt and otherlisted.txt are | pipe separated. That should give you a good list of all stocks.

I managed to do something similar by using this URL:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.industry%20where%20id%20in%20(select%20industry.id%20from%20yahoo.finance.sectors)&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys

It downloads a complete list of stock symbols using the Yahoo YQL API, including the stock name, stock symbol, and industry ID. What it doesn't seem to have is any sort of stock symbol modifiers. E.g. for Rogers Communications Inc, it only downloads RCI, not RCI-A.TO, RCI-B.TO, etc. I haven't found a source for that information yet - if anyone knows of a way to automate downloading that, I'd like to hear it. Also, it'd be nice to find a way to download some sort of relation between the stock symbol and the exchange it's traded on, since some are traded on multiple exchanges, or maybe I only want to look at stuff on the TSX or something.