ystockquote.get_historical_prices cannot handle dynamic dates

Question

I'm trying to build a portfolio management program, using ystockquote.

I can scrape prices using

ystockquote.get_historical_prices(y, '2013-11-01', '2013-11-11')

where y loops through a list of symbols ie. ('MSFT', 'F', 'MMM') I want the dates to be dynamic, but the following code

print sDate
print eDate

for y in depot_sym:
print ystockquote.get_historical_prices(y, sDate, eDate)

produces the following

2013-09-30
2013-11-19                                                                      
Traceback (most recent call last):                                                
File "C:\***\deriv4\test.py", line 26, in <module>       
print ystockquote.get_historical_prices(y, sDate, eDate)                      
File "C:\Anaconda\lib\site-packages\ystockquote.py", line 156, in get_historical_prices                                                                           
'a': int(start_date[5:7]) - 1,                                              
TypeError: 'datetime.date' object has no attribute '__getitem__'                

why is this?

Answer 1

ystockquote.get_historical_prices() expects strings in the format "YYYY-MM-DD", rather than date objects, as the second and third arguments. Try casting your dates using

sDate.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")