APIs and interacting with the world wide web

Intermediate Importing Data in Python

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Data Scientist at DataCamp

Herein, you’ll learn

What APIs are
Why APIs are important
In the exercises:
- Connecting to APIs
- Pulling data from APIs
- Parsing data from APIs

What is an API?

Set of protocols and routines
Bunch of code
- Allows two software programs to communicate with each other

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What is an API?

Set of protocols and routines
Bunch of code
- Allows two software programs to communicate with each other

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APIs are everywhere

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APIs are everywhere

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APIs are everywhere

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APIs are everywhere

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Connecting to an API in Python

import requests
url = 'http://www.omdbapi.com/?t=hackers'
r = requests.get(url)
json_data = r.json()
for key, value in json_data.items():
    print(key + ':', value)

What was that URL?

http - making an HTTP request
www.omdbapi.com - querying the OMDB API
?t=hackers
- Query string
- Return data for a movie with title (t) ‘Hackers’
'http://www.omdbapi.com/?t=hackers'

OMDb API

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OMDb API

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It’s a regular URL!

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Let's practice!

Intermediate Importing Data in Python