How to fetch json data from api in python
How to Access Web APIs using Python Requests and JSON
Timecodes:
okay everybody welcome to python api
requests using json
json's case means javascript object
notation
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so today what we're going to be taking a
look at is using
the request module and json module
to do web api requests now an api
is an application programming interface
and the website that we're going to be
in you know interacting with
is called tvmaze.com and they have
information about
tv programs now real quick uh jason
is something called i guess i mentioned
earlier javascript
object notation it is a way for
information to be exchanged between
programs it is text based
and uh but it looks a lot well you'll
see it later it is basically text-based
but it has a very specific format that
is easy to use especially
in python let's go ahead and get started
now i am assuming that you have already
seen my requests
demo if you don't know how the request
module works go watch that first
and then come back here so what i want
to do is i want to connect
to the tv maze api now
there's a link here i'll put it down
below it says tvmaze.com
api brings you to this page and in this
page it talks about
the various api calls that you can do
so it tells you here the root url is
right here
and here are some of the different types
of api
searches you can do and there's some
other information
here as well now for just an average
person you don't really need to worry
about
you know all this crazy stuff over here
let's just focus on the easy stuff
over here now i've chosen to use the
show
single search as an example just because
it's the simplest one that i could
figure out
so this is the url now notice it's not a
complete url because you have to add the
http api.tpmaze.com part to it
but if i click this example i'm going to
go ahead and open that in a new
page and what it does is it returns json
so i'm going to take a look at this is
the raw data for that
okay that's a little bit hard to see
here but if i click here now this is
something that
i guess firefox does automatically so it
gives you kind of an idea of what you're
doing
now json is a lot like a dictionary in
python
you've got a key and some sort of value
so id is 139
url is this the name is girls this is
the example they have
and really good show i haven't seen it
for a while but it's a it's a really
good show
if you get a chance check it out anyway
so this is what
the information i should say that we can
get back from
tvmaze.com about the show girls
and now instead of doing this in the
browser what we're going to do is we're
going to do it over here
in python which is pretty cool so let's
go ahead and get started with that
so i'm going to go ahead and use my
import requests
again this is from my other tutorial if
you haven't seen that check it out
i'm going to need the url and i'm just
going to go ahead and
basically just copy that from here so
i'm going to go ahead
and copy the example so i know the
example works
i'm going to cut off the question
[Music]
equals girl's part let me go ahead and
make this a little bit wider so a little
more
to refer to here and the parameters the
params
you can call it whatever you want but
i'm using params
and so in the example that we we got
earlier
was girls okay so again i'm just copying
what is over here and i put a capital g
here i don't think that matters
so what i want to do is i want to get a
response
from using the request module so i'm
going to use requests.get
and it's url params okay
now this response is not text it is a
response
object again i explain that in my
request demo check that out if you
haven't
and what we do is i'm going to say if
response dot status code
equals 200 200 means that everything
went through perfectly there's no
problems
i'm going to go ahead and print the
response
dot text okay and that should be our
json
code that or i guess code uh response
that we saw
over here and this is a raw data okay
it's not gonna be nicely formatted like
this it's gonna be raw data
so i should see that down below i'm
going to do else
you know print you know ffstring
error you know and then i'm going to put
the status code in here
hopefully we won't have that but just in
case response.status
code in case i got the url mixed up or
something like that
so i'm going to go ahead and run this
and see what happens you see there's a
little bit of a delay
and now you can see here is
the json code for the json response so
id 139 url blah blah blah blah which is
pretty cool
okay so very easy surprisingly easy
actually if you think about it
so we were able to
just using a few lines of code i didn't
even have to use this if stuff here
but let's see one two three four
basically five lines of code
i was able to get that and print it out
now the thing you have to remember
is that this is actually text it's not a
python dictionary looks like it
but it's not a python dictionary it's
text so we have to be able to pull that
information
out of there now the easiest way to do
this that i know of
is to convert this text into
a python dictionary which is
surprisingly straightforward to do that
i'm going to go import
json json and this is a python module
that will let you manipulate json data
so what i'm going to do here
is i'm going to say the data equals
jason dot uh what is it
load s don't forget the s
load is a different command see where it
says loads str
so it takes the string so response dot
text and it will convert that into
a data this data will become a
dictionary it returns a dictionary
so now i can go print data
and see what we get here response is not
defined because i spelled it
wrong uh response
rip stone response
that's always embarrassing but you know
it's good to see everybody does this
so response and you can see it looks
very much the same
because the format's very very similar
okay so
i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead
and do import p print
which is pretty print i'm going to go
ahead and do
print dot print data
and run that again this gives us the
data in a formatted kind of
easy to read method
so again you can see some of the keys
that we can
use so we got the name of the show is
girls
it premiered on a certain time had a
rating
and there's just different things that
we can do with this
so let's go ahead and pull out the name
and let's say premiered and we'll do the
summary
so we've got three keys name premiered
and summary so remember that
so i'm not going to pretty print that
anymore i'm just going to comment that
out
oops so what i want to do
i said name equals premiered
equals and what was it summary
equals now remember this is a dictionary
and if you look closely
we got pretty lucky with this one and i
chose it because this one's pretty
simple
these are the keys and they're like
first level keys they're not like
embedded down further
now you see there are some dictionaries
inside of dictionaries which
makes a little bit more complicated but
i'm sticking to the simple stuff
so the name is going to give us this
data the premiere is going to give us
this data
and the summary is going to give us this
data
so this is just like a normal python
dictionary
so data and this is going to be name
i could use double quotes there it
doesn't really matter data
and premiere just make sure you spell
that correctly
and data summary
okay and that's what i'll do is i'll go
ahead and print that out so print
uh f when i use f strings they're very
convenient
premiered on
and print uh summary
okay so name
premiere on premiere okay
and again this is a very very common
pattern
like encoding something like especially
something like this first we
pull out you know we get the we get the
data somehow from somewhere
in this case it's a response object from
that response
object we pull out the text that we need
then we converted it to
the data format that we needed and then
we pulled out the individual pieces of
data
that we need so the name premiered and
summary now again i didn't have to this
didn't have to be name i could have
called it show
name or something like that this could
have been np or s
but again i like to use you know names
that make a lot of sense so it's very
easy to see what my program does
so now if i run this you can see
that i pulled out the information so the
girls
premiered on and here's the date and
here is the summary now note this
summary happens to have
html tags in it so i assume this is i
presume this was
meant for the web but uh anyway that's
that's a story for another day how to
filter that stuff out
um let's see what else do i want to do
okay so i
could change girls i'm going to try a
couple different shows just to see
what's going on here
let's try star trek
okay and you can see here uh star trek
premiered on
on june 24th 1964. that was a long time
ago
and you can see it talks about james
kirk the enterprise etc etc
and let's try next generation
sorry i'm a big star trek fan sorry star
wars people uh let's see if that pops up
oh wow okay so star trek the next
generation prepared
premiered on uh was that nine whatever 9
28 september 28th
1987 that is also going back but not
quite as far as the original
and yeah so you can see that this tv
maze
website has quite a few different uh
quite a lot of information i should say
so yeah it's pretty cool
and let's see what else let's try the
mentalist so i'm a big mentalist fan
to list as well let's go ahead and run
that
oh very cool okay so that is metals
premiered on 2008 so
923 2008 very very interesting
great show if you haven't seen it it's
definitely on netflix so
there you have it um it's surprisingly
straightforward and easy to do this
now again i you know i i prepared this
ahead of time i've done this before
so i already knew you know kind of how
to pull the data out
probably that's the hardest part about
this is you know every website's going
to return the data
it's going to be json but what are the
keys going to be
how are they going to be nested and all
that sort of thing so you have to kind
of you know play around with pulling the
data out
but again for this one it's pretty
straightforward it only returns one
possibility
and then again that is why i chose it
now there are other you know open apis
they're called
and you can just access them without
making any sort of
you know account this is a nice one for
getting started i would strongly
recommend that you not
put this in a i'm going to put it do you
not put this in a loop
because if you mess it up and you make
too many requests you can get blocked
what i might want to do with this
program just to make it fun i might say
show
equals input you know please
input a show name
oops and then in here
i would put you know show so that way i
don't have to i'm not hard coding
when i run the program it's going to ask
me for a particular show
and i'm going to say billions because
i'm watching that right now
and you can see here billions premiered
on january 17
2016 is a complex drama it is absolutely
a complex drama but it's really good
check that out if you have a chance
uh anyway so that is that that is how
you
basically pull data out of an api uh
on a web page that provides it not all
web pages provide this of course
and yeah that's it you pull it out
take the text convert it to a dictionary
using the json module and then you pull
the individual pieces of data out that
you need
just using standard diction you know
python dictionary notation
and then you output the data as it's
needed
i'll put all this stuff down below so
you can copy it out and try it yourself
so yeah good luck uh click like
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join whatever you can do and as i like
to say keep on coding take care
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