We previously discussed how you can pull news items for specific topics/stocks using the StockViz News API. But all that the script did was show you a link to the news item. But who has the patience to click on a link, go to the website only to get annoyed by the ads? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just read the news then and there?
Goose
Python Goose is an open-source article extractor written in python. It takes any news article and extracts the main body of the article and also all meta data. By adding a few lines of code, you can convert the previous script into a news reader of sorts that displays just the article, minus the cruft.
4 lines of code:
| import the library: | from goose import Goose |
| initialize goose: | g = Goose() |
| extract the article: | article = g.extract(url=r[‘SOURCE’]) |
| clean the article: | cleaned = article.cleaned_text.encode(‘ascii’, ‘ignore’) |
You can see the whole script here.
Sentiment
One of the advantages of Mashape is that there are number of other APIs that you can access from within your account. Most of these have a “freemium” plan, just like our API. One of these is the Free Natural Language Processing Service.
The NLP Service takes a URL and returns the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) along with a sentiment score.
2 lines of code:
| make the call: | response2 = unirest.get(…) |
| read the sentiment: | sentiment = response2.body[“sentiment-text”] |
You can see the whole script here.
Now you can tailor the what, when and how of the news you want to track. You could bundle all this up with a fancy user interface. Or pipe this through a messaging API (like SendHub?) Chief ingredient: your imagination!