eolas/zk/Network_requests_in_Python.md

tags
python APIs

Making network requests in Python

We can use the requests package to make API requests to RESTful resources and handle the data as JSON.

pip install requests

Here is a basic architecture for making a GET request in Python.

import requests

def get_data(url):
    response = requests.get(url)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        return response.json()
    else:
        raise Exception(
            f"Failed to fetch data from API. Status code: {response.status_code}")

def main():
    url = "https://dummyjson.com/products/1"

    try:
        data = get_data(url)
        print(data)

    except Exception as e:
        prin(e)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Parsing returned data

Running main returns:

{
   "id":1,
   "title":"iPhone 9",
   "description":"An apple mobile which is nothing like apple",
   "price":549,
   "discountPercentage":12.96,
   "rating":4.69,
   "stock":94,
   "brand":"Apple",
   "category":"smartphones",
   "thumbnail":"https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/thumbnail.jpg",
   "images":[
      "https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/1.jpg",
      "https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/2.jpg",
      "https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/3.jpg",
      "https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/4.jpg",
      "https://i.dummyjson.com/data/products/1/thumbnail.jpg"
   ]
}

This is JSON but in Python is a dictionary

We can use standard dictionary methods to handle the data. For example, we'll add to the existing try block:

example_key = "brand"  # Replace with the key you want to access from the JSON data
    if example_key in data:
        print(f"Value of '{example_key}':", data[example_key])
    else:
        print(f"'{example_key}' not found in the JSON data")

Which, if successful, outputs:

Value of 'brand': Apple