Using APIs with Requests in Python: 3 Examples

Introduction to Using APIs with Requests in Python

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow different software applications to communicate with each other. In Python, the requests library simplifies the process of making HTTP requests to interact with APIs. In this article, we will explore three diverse examples of using APIs with requests in Python. Each example is designed to show you how to fetch and manipulate data from various sources.

Example 1: Fetching Weather Data from a Public API

In this example, we will retrieve current weather data for a specific city using the OpenWeatherMap API. This is a useful example if you want to create a weather application or integrate weather information into your project.

To get started, you need to sign up for a free API key at OpenWeatherMap.

import requests

## Define the endpoint and your API key
api_key = 'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'
city = 'London'
url = f'http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q={city}&appid={api_key}&units=metric'

## Make the GET request
response = requests.get(url)

## Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
    data = response.json()
    temperature = data['main']['temp']
    weather_description = data['weather'][0]['description']
    print(f'The current temperature in {city} is {temperature}°C with {weather_description}.')
else:
    print(f'Error: {response.status_code}')

In this code:

• We define the API endpoint and include the city and API key in the URL.
• We make a GET request to the API and check the response status.
• If successful, we extract the temperature and weather description from the JSON response.

Notes

• Replace YOUR_API_KEY_HERE with your actual API key.
• You can change the city variable to get weather data for different locations.

Example 2: Posting Data to a JSON Placeholder API

This example demonstrates how to send data to an API using the JSON Placeholder service, which is a great tool for testing and prototyping. We will create a new post.

import requests

## Define the API endpoint
url = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts'

## Create a new post data
post_data = {
    'title': 'foo',
    'body': 'bar',
    'userId': 1
}

## Make the POST request
response = requests.post(url, json=post_data)

## Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 201:
    print('Post created successfully:', response.json())
else:
    print(f'Error: {response.status_code}')

In this code:

• We set the API endpoint to the JSON Placeholder URL for posts.
• We create a dictionary representing the new post we want to create.
• We use the requests.post() method to send the data.
• The response checks if the post was created successfully and prints the returned data.

Notes

• This example shows how to send JSON data to an API. You can modify the post_data dictionary to include different values.
• The JSON Placeholder service will not save the data permanently, so this is purely for testing.

Example 3: Authenticating with a GitHub API

In this example, we will use the GitHub API to fetch user information. GitHub requires authentication for certain requests, so we will use a personal access token. This is useful if you want to interact with repositories or user profiles programmatically.

```python
import requests

Define the API endpoint and the token

url = ‘https://api.github.com/user’
access_token = ‘YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE’
headers = {’Authorization’: f’token {access_token}’}

Make the GET request

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

Check if the request was successful

if response.status_code == 200: user_data = response.json()
print(f’User: {user_data[