Mining Social Media

3GETTING DATA WITH CODE

By now, you’ve seen how to call an API through your browser to access specific data. Next, you’ll learn how to make these calls through a Python script and how to read data, store it, and write it into a file.

Previously, we typed lines of Python directly into an interactive shell that interpreted them, helping convey instantly how Python works. But as we’re moving toward more complicated uses of Python, we’ll need to shift gears and start using a text editor to write Python scripts.

You can write scripts in a free text editor preinstalled on your computer, such as TextEdit on Mac or WordPad on Windows, but it’s better ...