Today I will go through the “Unofficial Python API for Hacker News”, which can be found here

What is Hacker News?

Hacker News is a social news website that caters to programmers and entrepreneurs, delivering content related to computer science and entrepreneurship. [source]

Python Wrapper

In the How to use Reddit API in Python, we described how to directly access Reddit API directly. Another way of doing that would be to use one of the Reddit wrappers. A wrapper is an API client, that are commonly used to wrap the API into easy to use functions by doing the API calls itself. When using a wrapper, you don’t have to care what’s going on behind the scenes, which sometimes can be easier for a beginner. Think of it as a interface between python and a web service.

Getting started

Let’s get started and install it by using the pip tool.

pip search HackerNews
HackerNews                - Python API for Hacker News.

pip install HackerNews

Successfully installed HackerNews Cleaning up… pip show HackerNews — Name: HackerNews Version: 1.3.3 Location: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages Requires: BeautifulSoup4

API documentation

It is suggested that you read the documentation, which is available on this Github page. The API contains a few classes (HN and Story). The classes provides you with methods. The available methods for the HN class are: get_top_stories() Returns a list of Story objects from the homepage of HN get_newest_stories() Returns a list of Story objects from the newest page of HN The available method for the Story class is: print_story() – Print the details of a story

Run the program

The author of the API provides an example on his Github page. The example prints top and new posts from Hacker news. Open your favorite editor and copy and paste the following code.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from hn import HN

hn = HN()

# print top 10 stories from homepage
for story in hn.get_top_stories()[:10]:
    story.print_story()
    print '*' * 50
    print ''

# print 10 latest stories
for story in hn.get_newest_stories()[:10]:
    story.print_story()
    print '*' * 50
    print ''

# print all self posts from the homepage
for story in hn.get_top_stories():
    if story.is_self_post:
        story.print_story()
        print '*' * 50
        print ''

Save it as test_bot.py and run it. The program will loop through every story (post) on hacker news and give you the top 10 latest stories. For every post it will show information seen below Story details rank – the rank of story on the page story_id – the story’s id title – the title of the story is_self_post – true for self/job stories link – the url it points to (None for self posts) domain – the domain of the link (None for self posts) points – the points/karma on the story submitter – the user who submitted the story submitter_link – the above user profile link published_time – the published time ago num_comments – the number of comments it has comments_link – the link to the comments page Using a python wrapper for an API is nice and simple, but try to understand whats going on behind the scenes. It is important that you understand what is going on in the code, and once you learned it, you can go for wrapper. Try to get knowledge about Json and API’s, to understand how most of them work.

More Reading

HackerNewsAPI

List of Python APIs

The post How to use the Hacker News API appeared first on PythonForBeginners.com.

In an earlier post “How to access various Web Services in Python“, we described
how we can access services such as YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter via their API’s.

Note, there are a few Reddit Wrappers that you can use to interact with Reddit.

A wrapper is an API client, that are commonly used to wrap the API into easy to
use functions by doing the API calls itself.

That results in that the user of it can be less concerned with how the code
actually works.

If you don’t use a wrapper, you will have to access the Reddits API directly,
which is exactly what we will do in this post.

Getting started

Since we are going to focus on the API from Reddit, let’s head over to their API
documentation. I recommend that you get familiar with the documentation and also
pay extra attention to the the overview and the sections about “modhashes”,
“fullnames” and “type prefixes”.

The result from the API will return as either XML or JSON. In this post we will
use the JSON format.

Please refer to above post or the official documentation for more information
about the JSON structure.

API documentation

In the API documentation, you can see there are tons of things to do.

In this post, we have chosen to extract information from our own Reddit account.

The information we need for that is: GET /user/username/where[ .json | .xml ]

GET /user/username/where[ .json | .xml ]

? /user/username/overview
? /user/username/submitted
? /user/username/comments
? /user/username/liked
? /user/username/disliked
? /user/username/hidden
? /user/username/saved

Viewing the JSON output

If we for example want to use “comments”, the URL would be:
http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json

You can see that we have replaced “username” and “where” with our own input.

To see the data response, you can either make a curl request, like this:

curl http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json

…or just paste the URL into your browser.

You can see that the response is JSON. This may be difficult to look at in the
browser, unless you have the JSONView plugin installed.

These extensions are available for Firefox and Chrome.

Start coding

Now that we have the URL, let’s start to do some coding.

Open up your favourite IDLE / Editor and import the modules that we will need.

Importing the modules. The pprint and json modules are optional.

from pprint import pprint

import requests

import json

Make The API Call

Now its time to make the API call to Reddit.

r = requests.get(r'http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json')

Now, we have a Response object called “r”. We can get all the information we need
from this object.

JSON Response Content

The Requests module comes with a builtin JSON decoder, which we can use for with
the JSON data.

As you could see on the image above, the output that we get is not really what we
want to display.

The question is, how do we extract useful data from it?

If we just want to look at the keys in the “r” object:

r = requests.get(r'http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json')

data = r.json()

print data.keys()

That should give us the following output:

[u’kind’, u’data’]

These keys are very important to us.

Now its time to get the data that we are interested in.

Get the JSON feed and copy/paste the output into a JSON editor to get an easier
overview over the data.

An easy way of doing that is to paste JSON result into an online JSON editor.

I use http://jsoneditoronline.org/ but any JSON editor should do the work.

Let’s see an example of this:

r = requests.get(r'http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json')
r.text

As you can see from the image, we get the same keys (kind, data) as we did before
when we printed the keys.

Convert JSON into a dictionary

Let’s convert the JSON data into Python dictionary.

You can do that like this:

r.json()

#OR

json.loads(r.text)

Now when we have a Python dictionary, we start using it to get the the results
we want.

Navigate to find useful data

Just navigate your way down until you find what you’re after.

r = requests.get(r'http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json')

r.text

data = r.json()

print data['data']['children'][0]

The result is stored in the variable “data”.

To access our JSON data, we simple use the bracket notation, like this:
data[‘key’].

Remember that an array is indexed from zero.

Instead of printing each and every entry, we can use a for loop to iterate
through our dictionary.

for child in data['data']['children']:

    print child['data']['id'], "
", child['data']['author'],child['data']['body']

    print

We can access anything we want like this, just look up what data you are
interested in.

The complete script

As you can see in our complete script, we only have to import one module:
(requests)

import requests

r = requests.get(r'http://www.reddit.com/user/spilcm/comments/.json')

r.text

data = r.json()

for child in data['data']['children']:
    print child['data']['id'], "
", child['data']['author'],child['data']['body']
    print

When you run the script, you should see something similar to this:

More Reading

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

The post How to use Reddit API in Python appeared first on PythonForBeginners.com.

An application programming interface (API) is a protocol intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other. It’s basically a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based software application or Web tool. A software company (like Amazon, Google etc) releases its API to the public so that other software developers can design products that are powered by its service. For a more extended explanation on API, read this excellent article from howstuffworks.com.

Interact with an API using JSON

It is important to know that an API is a software-to-software interface, not a user interface. With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention. When we want to interact with an API in Python (like accessing web services), we get the responses in a form called JSON. To interact with JSON, we can use the json and simplejson modules. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a compact, text based format for computers to exchange data and is once loaded into Python just like a dictionary. JSON data structures map directly to Python data types, which makes this a powerful tool for directly accessing data without having to write any XML parsing code.

How do I do this?

Let’s show how we can do this by using Twittes API. The first thing you have to do, is to find an URL to call the API. The next step is to import the modules that we need.

import json
import urllib2

# open the url and the screen name 
# (The screen name is the screen name of the user for whom to return results for)
url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=python"

# this takes a python object and dumps it to a string which is a JSON
# representation of that object
data = json.load(urllib2.urlopen(url))

# print the result
print data

More Examples

Using the Youtube API

Using the Vimeo API

Using the Twitter API

Using the Delicious API

LastFM API

Amazon API

Google API

Sources

http://money.howstuffworks.com/business-communications/how-to-leverage-an-api-for-conferencing1.htm

The post Python API and JSON appeared first on PythonForBeginners.com.

In this post we will be looking on how to use the YouTube API in Python. This program will show how we can use the API to retrieve feeds from YouTube. This particular script will show the most popular videos on YouTube right now.

Standard Feeds

Some of the most popular YouTube feeds are: most_recent most_viewed top_rated most_discussed top_favorites most_linked recently_featured most_responded

Getting Started

To start getting the data that we want from the YouTube feeds, we begin by importing the necessary modules.

import requests
import json

We make it a bit “prettier” by printing out what the program does. Then we get the feed by using the requests module. I used to use the urllib2 module to open the URL, but ever since Kenneth Reitz gave us the Requests module, I’m letting that module do most of my HTTP tasks.

r = requests.get("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?v=2&alt=jsonc")
r.text

After we have got the feed and saved it to the variable “r”, we convert it into a Python dictionary.

 data = json.loads(r.text)

Now, we have a use a for loop to go through the data

for item in data['data']['items']:

This can sometimes be the tricky part and you need to look carefully how the structure is presented to you. Using a JSON editor will make it easier.

Using the YouTube API to get data

This script will show the most popular videos on YouTube.

# Import the modules
import requests
import json

# Make it a bit prettier..
print "-" * 30
print "This will show the Most Popular Videos on YouTube"
print "-" * 30

# Get the feed
r = requests.get("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?v=2&alt=jsonc")
r.text

# Convert it to a Python dictionary
data = json.loads(r.text)

# Loop through the result. 
for item in data['data']['items']:

    print "Video Title: %s" % (item['title'])

    print "Video Category: %s" % (item['category'])

    print "Video ID: %s" % (item['id'])

    print "Video Rating: %f" % (item['rating'])

    print "Embed URL: %s" % (item['player']['default'])

    print

Using string formatting makes it a lot easier to view the code.

# Sample Output ------------------------------ This will show the Most Popular Videos on YouTube ------------------------------ Video Title: PSY - GANGNAM STYLE (?????) M/V Video Category: Music Video ID: 9bZkp7q19f0 Video Rating: 4.614460 Embed URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0&feature=youtube_gdata_player Video Title: PSY - GENTLEMAN M/V Video Category: Music Video ID: ASO_zypdnsQ Video Rating: 4.372500 Embed URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASO_zypdnsQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player Video Title: MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS - THRIFT SHOP FEAT. WANZ (OFFICIAL VIDEO) Video Category: Music Video ID: QK8mJJJvaes Video Rating: 4.857624 Embed URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes&feature=youtube_gdata_player

How to use other YouTube feeds

To use another YouTube standard feed, simple replace the feed in the URL: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/most_responded?v=2&alt=jsonc You may have to modify the script to get the expected result.

The post Using the YouTube API in Python appeared first on PythonForBeginners.com.

In this post we will be looking on how to use the Vimeo API in Python. 

About the Vimeo API

Vimeo offers an API which lets us integrate with their site and build applications
on top of their data.

Vimeo provides a "Simple API" and an "Advanced API".

To perform authenticated read/write requests on videos, users, groups, channels,
albums, or upload, you will have to use the Advanced API.

It uses OAuth for authentication, so you will first need to sign up.

When using the Simple API, you don’t need to register or authenticate your app.

One of the drawback with using the Simple API is that it’s limited to public data
and is read-only. 

The response limits in the Simple API include up to 20 items per page.

Vimeos API provides different Response formats, and they all return the exact
same data.

Getting Started

After looking at the website of Vimeo, I found out that I can start out with this
URL: http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/video_id.output

the video_id is the ID of the video you want information for.

the output specifies which type that we want (json, xml)

Common Vimeo Requests

Making a User Request
Making a Video Request
Making an Activity Request
Making a Group Request
Making a Channel Request
Making an Album Request

Using the Vimeo API to get data

This script will show how you can set up the script to make a Video request from
Vimeo.

import requests

import json

r = requests.get("http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/48082757.json")

r.text

data = json.loads(r.text)

'do something with the data'

Vimeo has been kind enough to provide some API examples for us which can be found
on their GitHub repository. https://github.com/vimeo/vimeo-api-examples

More Reading

http://developer.vimeo.com/apis/

The post How to use the Vimeo API in Python appeared first on PythonForBeginners.com.