soliproductions.blogg.se - Listaway tutorial

The most commonly used one, a GET request, is used to retrieve data. There are many different types of requests. Now that we’ve installed and imported the requests library, let’s start using it. Let’s start with that important step: import requests Once you’ve installed the library, you’ll need to import it. If you use conda, the command you’ll need is: conda install requests If you use pip to manage your Python packages, you can install requests using the following command: pip install requests The requests library isn’t part of the standard Python library, so you’ll need to install it to get started. In Python, the most common library for making requests and working with APIs is the requests library. In order to work with APIs in Python, we need tools that will make those requests. For instance, when you visited this blog post, your web browser made a request to the Dataquest web server, which responded with the content of this web page.ĪPI requests work in exactly the same way – you make a request to an API server for data, and it responds to your request. When we want to receive data from an API, we need to make a request. APIs are most commonly used to retrieve data, and that will be the focus of this beginner tutorial. What is an API?Īn API, or Application Programming Interface, is a server that you can use to retrieve and send data to using code. If you’re looking for something more advanced, check out our Intermediate API tutorial. If you don’t, you might like to try our free Python Fundamentals course.

This tutorial is based on part of our interactive course on APIs and Webscraping in Python, which you can start for free.įor this tutorial, we assume that you know some of the fundamentals of working with data in Python. In this blog post, we’ll be querying a simple API to retrieve data about the International Space Station (ISS). In cases like the ones above, an API is the right solution. You could theoretically create your own classifier, and use it to compute music categories, but you’ll never have as much data as Spotify does. Spotify has an API that can tell you the genre of a piece of music.

There is repeated computation involved.

What if you want to just pull your own comments on Reddit? It doesn’t make much sense to download the entire Reddit database, then filter just your own comments.

You want a small piece of a much larger set of data.

It doesn’t really make sense to regenerate a dataset and download it every minute - this will take a lot of bandwidth, and be pretty slow. To use an API, you make a request to a remote web server, and retrieve the data you need.īut why use an API instead of a static CSV dataset you can download from the web? APIs are useful in the following cases:

Websites like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook all offer certain data through their APIs. There are millions of APIs online which provide access to data. In this Python API tutorial, we’ll learn how to retrieve data for data science projects.