Fetch and Write 13F Filings | Dataford Interview Questions

Take-home: write a Python program that retrieves certain companies' 13F filings from SEC EDGAR (XML) and writes them to a tab-separated file; include a thorough README.

Asked in the take-home stage. Web scraping team; filings are in an XML file.

Contract

Implement write_13f_tsv(filings, output_path). filings is a list of objects containing company, cik, and either an EDGAR url or test-only XML text in xml. Fetch URLs with a descriptive User-Agent, parse each information table, and write one row per holding. Return the output path.

Use this column order: company, cik, issuer, class, cusip, value, shares, share_type, put_call, investment_discretion. Missing XML fields must be empty. Preserve source values, sort rows by CIK and CUSIP, and document setup, assumptions, errors, and usage in the README.

Constraints

1 <= number of filings <= 100
Each XML document contains zero or more information-table entries
XML namespaces and namespace URIs may vary
Use only Python standard-library modules
Output columns must use the specified order

Function Signature

def write_13f_tsv(filings, output_path):

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