Beginner's Guide to Requests and APIs

The requests module is your portal to the open web.🤯 Basically any API that you have access to, you can pull data from it (Though your mileage may vary).

Getting Started ✊

Installing requests needs pipenv, so go ahead and install that first if you don't have it. If you do, simply run this command:

pipenv install requests

Let's go ahead and pick an API to use.🤔

Here is a great resource to public APIs:

public-apis / public-apis

A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.

Public APIs

A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.

A public API for this project can be found here!

For information on contributing to this project, please see the contributing guide.

Please note a passing build status indicates all listed APIs are available since the last update. A failing build status indicates that 1 or more services may be unavailable at the moment.

Index

• Animals
• Anime
• Anti-Malware
• Art & Design
• Books
• Business
• Calendar
• Cloud Storage & File Sharing
• Continuous Integration
• Cryptocurrency
• Currency Exchange
• Data Validation
• Development
• Dictionaries
• Documents & Productivity
• Environment
• Events
• Finance
• Food & Drink
• Games & Comics
• Geocoding
• Government
• Health
• Jobs
• Machine Learning
• Music
• News
• Open Data
• Open Source Projects
• Patent
• Personality
• Photography
• Science & Math
• Security
• Shopping
• Social
• Sports & Fitness
• Test Data
• Text Analysis
• Tracking
• Transportation
• URL Shorteners
• Vehicle
• Video
• Weather

Animals

API	Description	Auth	HTTPS	CORS
Cat

…

View on GitHub

Let's use the kanye.rest API for this quick example: https://kanye.rest/

Diving In 🙌

Let's import the all mighty:

import requests

And get-ting the data is pretty straightforward:

kanye_url = requests.get('https://api.kanye.rest')

Print it in JSON format:

print(kanye_url.json())
# gets a random quote
# {'quote': 'Tweeting is legal and also therapeutic'}

It is important to read the docs of each API because each API is unique 🧐

Let's say we want to get a Chuck Norris joke from this API:
From the docs it uses a different URL, so let's go ahead and code that:

chuck_url = requests.get('https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random')
print(chuck_url.json())

... will output something like this:

{'categories': [], 'created_at': '2016-05-01 10:51:41.584544', 'icon_url': 'https://assets.chucknorris.host/img/avatar/chuck-norris.png', 'id': 'DLqW_fuXQnO1LtveTTAWRg', 'updated_at': '2016-05-01 10:51:41.584544', 'url': 'https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/DLqW_fuXQnO1LtveTTAWRg', 'value': 'Chuck Norris Lost his virginity before his Dad...'}

...not exactly pretty to look at, so let's pretty-print it:💅

# 👇 Add this import below at the beginning of your file    
# import json

print(json.dumps(chuck_url.json(), indent=2))

Now it looks like this:

{
  "categories": [
    "science"
  ],
  "created_at": "2016-05-01 10:51:41.584544",
  "icon_url": "https://assets.chucknorris.host/img/avatar/chuck-norris.png",
  "id": "izjeqnjzteeqms8l8xgdhw",
  "updated_at": "2016-05-01 10:51:41.584544",
  "url": "https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/izjeqnjzteeqms8l8xgdhw",
  "value": "Chuck Norris knows the last digit of pi."
}

Now that's much more readable! 💪💪💪

Sources:
🐍 https://3.python-requests.org/
📖 https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis
🌊 https://kanye.rest/
🤠 https://api.chucknorris.io/