Ticker Sniffer (Work in Progress)

Ticker Sniffer is a Rust library built to parse and extract ticker symbols from text documents. It specializes in analyzing text content to identify references to U.S. stock market ticker symbols and calculates their frequency counts, returning the results as a HashMap.

Examples

CLI Example

cargo run --example simple

Code Example

use ticker_sniffer::extract_tickers_from_text;

fn main() {
    let text = "Apple and Microsoft are performing well in the market.";

    match extract_tickers_from_text(text) {
        Ok(results) => {
            for (ticker_symbol, frequency) in results {
                println!("{}: {}", ticker_symbol, frequency);
            }
        }
        Err(e) => eprintln!("Error extracting tickers: {}", e),
    }
}

How it Works

The text search engine employs a hybrid approach to identify company names and stock symbols in documents.

Initially, it filters out stop words and applies a sequence-based tokenizer to detect potential company names, preserving word order for contextual accuracy.

Simultaneously, a secondary tokenizer uses a Bag of Words approach to identify stock symbols, which may occasionally collide with stop words.

The engine calculates a ratio by comparing the number of company name matches to exact stock symbol matches found in the document.

Based on this ratio, it determines whether to include exact stock symbol matches in the results.

Regardless of the decision, the engine ensures that stock symbols are always matched, but the contextual importance of symbols is weighted by their relationship to identified company names.

Running Tests with Output Capturing

When running tests, you can use the --nocapture flag to display output from tests in the console. This is particularly useful for this package as there are tests which process several files at once.

Running All Tests

cargo test -- --nocapture

Running Specific Tests

For example, to run the tokenizer_tests module in isolation with visible output:

cargo test --test tokenizer_tests  -- --nocapture

Benching

cargo bench

Prototype Debug

RUST_LOG=debug cargo dev

Note: dev is an aliased Cargo command, as specified in the .cargo/config.toml file.

More information about Cargo aliases can be found at: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/config.html#configuration-format.

Lint

If clippy is not already installed:

rustup component add clippy

cargo clippy --fix

Suggestions:

cargo clippy -- -W clippy::all

Building CLI tool

Without Logging Support

cargo build --release --bin ticker-sniffer-cli

With Logging Support

cargo build --release --bin ticker-sniffer-cli --features="logger-support"

Running CLI tool (on Unix)

With debugging enabled. Note, it has to be compiled with logger-support feature added.

cho "Amazon" | RUST_LOG=debug ./target/release/ticker-sniffer-cli

Publishing Note

Currently, the build process does not use the OUT_DIR environment variable to generate temporary artifacts. Instead, temporary files are created directly within the repository. This approach ensures that a compressed form of the company_symbol_list.csv file is bundled correctly with the build, though it is acknowledged that this solution could likely be improved.

Known Issue During Publishing

When publishing the crate, you may encounter the following error:

error: 1 files in the working directory contain changes that were not yet committed into git:

Workaround

To proceed with publishing, use the --allow-dirty flag:

cargo publish --allow-dirty

ChatGPT-based Alternative Name Suggester

This app, powered by ChatGPT, assists in generating alternative names for companies. For more details, refer to data/README.md.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-675e2b64d02c8191ab4819b971aeeded-stock-company-alternative-name-suggester

License

MIT License (c) 2025 Jeremy Harris.