Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook - Second Edition

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the following steps:

1. First, let's define a function to get the data on REST, as shown in the following code:

import requestsdef do_request(service, a1=None, a2=None, a3=None, **kwargs):    server = 'http://api.gbif.org/v1'    params = ''    for a in [a1, a2, a3]:        if a is not None:            params += '/' + a    req = requests.get('%s/%s%s' % (server, service, params),        params=kwargs, headers={'Content-Type': 'application/json'})    if not req.ok:        req.raise_for_status()    return req.json()

2. Then, look at how many species records refer to the word bear. Remember that this is actually more general than species. You will also get records for all kinds of taxonomic ranks with the following code:

req = do_request('species', 'search', ...