Exercise 53

Getting Data from APIs

In this exercise you’ll access the application programmer interface (API) I use for my learncodethehardway.com website. In web development, an API is usually a combination of the following:

  1. A web server that you can access with the HTTP protocol. You used HTTP when you used urllib to get the beer production PDFs from the ttb.gov website. HTTP is also what your browser uses to display the web application to you.

  2. This web server responds in some data format that’s easily parsed. This is what differentiates a PDF from an API. Sure, you’re getting data on beer production from ttb.gov, but you have to parse that data out of a PDF. An API gives you the data ready to go in a format that loads directly into your application ...

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