WEB 1.1 - Module 3: Lesson 5

Learning Outcomes 💫

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to...

Use the Python requests library to make simple API requests and display the response.
Create Flask routes which make API calls and show the user a response.

Videos 🎥

Vid 1 - walking through how to create requests via the Requests Python library

Exercises 💪

Complete the exercises in this repl.it (only API, no Flask) and submit your work.
Complete the exercises in this repl.it (API and Flask) and submit your work.

Written Companion 🗒

<aside> 🤔 We can use tools like Postman to quickly make requests for API testing, but how do we create a request in Python?

</aside>

When developing in a Python environement, the Requests library can be used to create requests. The Requests library provides us with the following tools:

requests.get(routeURL, params) = the Requests method used to create a GET request
- routeURL = a string with the route URL information required to find the desired server
- params = an object of key-value pairs that contains the query parameters of the search.

The results of a requests.get() method includes information such as the header, packet data, and payload. Typically, an application only needs the payload data (most commonly a JSON object) so developers will usually use the .json() method on the results to seperate the valuable information from the junk.

import requests

# an object containing all the key-value pairs relevant to the query
params = { "limitTo": "nerdy" } 

# result contains the respone recieved from the requests.get() method
result = requests.get(
    "<http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random>", 
    params=params) 

# strip the JSON data from the results for easier access
joke_json = result.json()