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Accessing an API with Python
11:07Learn how to interact with an API using Python.
[MUSIC]
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Hi there, my name is Megan.
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And we're going to be looking at how
we can gather some data from an API, or
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Application Programming Interface
using Python.
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If you haven't heard of an API before,
I suggest taking a look at the teacher's
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notes below to get familiar with
the topic before continuing on.
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APIs allow us to interact
with different systems.
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For example, the Twitter API
allows us to gather tweets.
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The Google Calendar API
allows us to create events.
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And for our purposes, there are many
APIs that return valuable data.
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To practice, we're going to use
this random user generator API.
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You can see here that I have a project
folder open in Visual Studio code.
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I'm going to create a virtual environment.
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We're going to activate it and
I'm going to install requests.
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Perfect, and
then I'm just gonna clear our console out.
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When working with an API, you typically
make a request for information or data.
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And the API receives your request, and
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then sends back a response
with the data or information.
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With the API we have here,
we send a request to it, and
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it sends back a random user that
they have generated for you.
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Let's pop into the Python
shell to play around.
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We're going to import requests, perfect.
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And we're going to try calling the API,
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requests.get https://randomuser.me/api/,
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close it all out.
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Perfect.
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That sent a response to the API and
you can see it send us back a response.
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And it sent it back
pretty much right away.
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But not every API requests will come
back with a response instantly.
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Sometimes it takes a little bit.
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This is a response object and
it's showing us our status code which
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is 200 which means okay or
your request was successful.
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Check the teacher's notes for
a list of some common codes.
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So look at the data from the response,
let's take a quick peek at the docs.
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This is also linked below
in the teacher's notes.
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It looks like we can view
the response content by saving
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the response to a variable and
then calling our attribute .text.
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So let's give that a try.
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I'm going to do, instead of,
I know in the example they just did r,
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I'm gonna do res for response,
cuz that's what we get back.
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requests.get https,
make sure this is a string,
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randomuser.me/api/.
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Perfect.
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Now let's do our variable,
response, res.txt.
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And there's the results.
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This is the fake user that they've
created for us and sent back to us.
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And now remember, these are random users.
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So I have someone called Savannah Thomas,
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you are probably gonna have
a different random user.
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There's one small issue though.
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Can you see it?
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Response.txt is a string.
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You can see there's a string at
the top and down here at the bottom.
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So it's returned you a string with
all of this information in it.
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And we can see there are things like
dictionaries and this is a list.
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So having it as a string is going to make
it hard to parse or work with the data.
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Instead, let's make our job a little bit
easier by viewing the data in JSON format.
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Let's jump back into the docs.
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And if we scroll down a bit, you can
see we get this JSON response content.
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And essentially,
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you're doing the exact same thing except
you're calling .json instead of .text.
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And don't forget your parentheses here.
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This is a method call this time.
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Let's give it a try.
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So I just did up arrow.
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So respose.txt, let's do response.json.
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And you can see it looks
almost exactly the same, but
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our little symbols that would
make this a string are gone.
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Now it's just the data as it is,
which is perfect.
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This will make it a lot
easier to work with.
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Take a look closely at the data.
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It's a mixture of dictionaries and
lists, and more dictionaries.
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So it's going to be a little
tricky to access specific items.
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But luckily, most APIs have an example
response that is formatted a lot
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nicer than what you're probably
gonna see in the console.
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So, let's look at what we get.
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We get back an initial dictionary,
has a key item of results.
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And it looks like it has
a second key item of info and
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then it has all this
information inside of it.
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So inside of results we have this,
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if I go from the opening of our list,
to the closing of our list,
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has all of this information inside of it,
which is a dictionary.
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If I go from the start of this dictionary,
straight down to where it ends,
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it includes one single dictionary which
includes all of this information.
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And it just keeps getting further and
further down into the data.
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So you can see it's a lot
of mixed information.
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So what I want you to do right now is I
want you to practice accessing specific
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information in the result.
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I want you to try and
gather just the first name, so just for
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the example here in the docs would
be Brad, so just the first name.
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Then just the state which would be
Waterford here in this example.
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And then just the email which
the example would be this as the answer.
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Okay, so just the first name,
the state and the email.
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Go ahead and try accessing those
specific values on your own.
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Pause me.
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Solution time.
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Let's do this.
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I like to incrementally build
on one thing at a time so
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I can kind of see what I've got going on.
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So the first thing is everything
is inside of results.
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Perfect, and
then you can see it's a huge long list.
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And all of this is a single
dictionary item inside of one list.
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So it's not gonna look very different but
it is a list, and so
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I need to access this first
item which is the only item.
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So it doesn't look much different, but
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you can see that list symbol is gone
cuz now we're inside of the list.
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Now we have a dictionary.
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So you can see we have a key,
and then we have a value.
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And then we have name, and the value for
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name is this dictionary,
which then includes our first name.
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So I need to do our key of name.
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If I hit Enter,
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now I have just that dictionary
which is the value for the key name.
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So now in order to get our first name,
which for
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me is Savannah,
I need to access the key first.
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I'm gonna do up arrow first.
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And I get Savannah.
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So this is the entire solution
to access just the first name.
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That's why it's really good to
take some time to practice.
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Now let's try and do the state.
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So I'm gonna do up arrow, and
I'm gonna go back through all of this.
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So we're back here.
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And let's see, we have key value,
key value, key location.
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Looks like there's a street and
there's a city, and there's a state.
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So, because our location contains
a dictionary, let's do location next.
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Okay.
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Did that go?
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There it is, sorry.
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I was seeing all the information above and
I thought it didn't run but it did.
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Okay, so this is the response we got.
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I'll highlight it here so it's a little
bit easier for all of us to see.
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So you can see we have a street
which has a dictionary.
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We have a city which has
a string as the value.
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And then our state which is a key
with a string as its values.
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So up arrow, state.
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And you can see that it gives
us this as our state value.
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So our entire solution to access
just the state is this right here.
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Now the last one was the email.
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So same thing, I'm gonna put up arrow and
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I'm gonna take us all
the way back to here.
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And we get through our location
which was a dictionary,
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which included a street and
the city, and the state, country.
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Postcode, coordinates,
which was another dictionary.
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Timezone, which was another dictionary,
and you can see this is where that ended.
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And then we have a key of email and
a value.
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So this one is a little bit easier cuz
we don't have to dive down so deep.
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This one is just email,
savanna.thomas@example.com.
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So this is the entire solution for
the email.
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How did you do?
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If you struggled with this,
that's absolutely okay.
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The first time working with data
from an API is always funky and
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it's a lot of nested information.
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I would take some time right now to
practice accessing different pieces
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of information from this response
until you feel more comfortable.
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Take it one step at a time.
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