Web Scraping (Thomson Reuters Eikon)

Isaka.Hironobu

I usually use Thomson Reuters Eikon to collection latest news in a number of countries. Does that service allow web scraping? If I may, would like to automate the daily data collection process, so it would be much appreciated if you could reply.

Alex Putkov.1

@Isaka.Hironobu

I'm confused about what you're looking to do. What doesn't make sense to me is why you want to use Web scraping to retrieve news from Eikon when you can easily retrieve the news through documented and supported API. There's some content in Eikon that's not available through Eikon APIs. I would understand if you were looking to scrape that content. But news are available through the API. In any case, whatever the data you're looking to retrieve from Eikon, if this data is available through Eikon APIs, I would very strongly suggest using documented and supported APIs in preference over Web scraping. There's no documented and supported way to programmatically scrape the data off HTML pages rendered by various Eikon apps. If you'd like to try doing it, you should be aware of two issues.

1. All requests for Eikon data are authenticated. If you use a generic HTTP client, your requests will not include Eikon session cookie and will be rejected by Eikon platform. There may be a way to work around this and include the cookie with your requests, but off the top of my head I cannot think of a good way of doing it. Since none of this is documented, just figuring out the feasibility will require trial and error. And like I said, none of this will be supported by Refinitiv.

2. According to the standard Refinitiv contract, any data retrieved from Eikon is for individual user's use only. If you intend to scrape the data off HTML pages in Eikon apps for any purpose other than for your individual use, you need to subscribe to a different product or service from Refinitiv that provides the license to utilize the data you retrieve in the manner you intend. Otherwise your use of Refinitiv data will not be compliant.

Alex Putkov.1

@Isaka.Hironobu

The news available through News Monitor app in Eikon include news from an extensive range of Web news sources, which Refinitiv collects via RSS feeds and Web scraping and processes centrally. If Web news available through News Monitor app in Eikon do not include some Web news sources you're interested in, or if for any other reason you're interested in a generic Web scraping capability that you could use on your end, then I'm afraid Refinitiv does not provide such capability through any of our products and services. There are also no plans to introduce this capability, as we don't think it would be relevant or beneficial to our business.

Isaka.Hironobu

Thank you for your reply.
I am sorry that I could not make myself clear enough. My question is whether or not I can scrape the data from the Thomson Reuters Eikon. Is there any restriction for web scraping on the service? If possible, I would like to wirte the code for web scraping system on my own to automate my daily data collection. It would be appreciated if you could reply.