Have your friend give this Python library a try for you: pytickersymbols. It specifically exists to return ticker symbols. I have not used it extensively-only a brief test using the code below (which is taken from their documentation). The symbols come from Yahoo and Google finance. If you have interest in what is going on under the hood, this is the GitHub repo: pytickersymbols GitHub repo
from pytickersymbols import PyTickerSymbols
stock_data = PyTickerSymbols()
countries = stock_data.get_all_countries()
indices = stock_data.get_all_indices()
industries = stock_data.get_all_industries()
After running that code, you can view the tickers like this:
print(list(countries))
print(list(indices))
print(list(industries))
You can export the symbols to a .csv
or .xlsx
file as well if you need to work with them outside of Python. This is quite easy to do and shouldn't take your friend more than a few minutes of their time. There are also slight variations that allow you to call for specific countries in case you don't want a list of all stocks. You can find that info in the documentation in the above link.