Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook - Second Edition

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the following steps:

1. We will start by creating a support function to perform a web request:

import requestsensembl_server = 'http://rest.ensembl.org'def do_request(server, service, *args, **kwargs):    url_params = ''    for a in args:        if a is not None:            url_params += '/' + a    req = requests.get('%s/%s%s' % (server, service, url_params), params=kwargs, headers={'Content-Type': 'application/json'})    if not req.ok:        req.raise_for_status()    return req.json()

We start by importing the requests library and specifying the root URL. Then, we create a simple function that will take the functionality to be called (see the following examples) and generate a complete URL. It will also add optional parameters and specify the ...