Find Company Tickers Mentioned in a News Headline

Question

This question asks the candidate to write a function that extracts company tickers from a given news headline.

Codemia · Accepted Answer

To solve the problem, we need to extract stock tickers from a news headline. Tickers are typically uppercase letters and can be followed by a period or other symbols. We will assume that tickers are separated by spaces or punctuation.

We can use regular expressions to identify patterns that match stock tickers. The regex pattern will look for sequences of uppercase letters that may be followed by optional punctuation. We will implement this in a function that takes a string as input and returns a list of tickers.

Here is a Python implementation of the solution:

```python
import re

def extract_tickers(headline):
    # Regex pattern to find tickers
    pattern = r'\b[A-Z]{1,5}\b'
    return re.findall(pattern, headline)

# Example usage
headline = 'Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Tesla (TSLA) report earnings'
tickers = extract_tickers(headline)
print(tickers)  # Output: ['AAPL', 'TSLA']
```

The time complexity of this solution is O(n), where n is the length of the headline string. This is because we are scanning the string once to find all matches. The space complexity is O(k), where k is the number of tickers found, as we store them in a list.

We should consider edge cases such as headlines without any tickers, headlines with invalid formats, or multiple tickers. Our regex should be robust enough to handle these scenarios, and we can add additional checks if necessary.

Find Company Tickers Mentioned in a News Headline

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