Python & APIs: A Winning Combo for Reading Public Data

Python & APIs: A Winning Combo for Reading Public Data
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Python is an excellent choice for working with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), allowing you to efficiently consume and interact with them. By using the Requests library, you can easily fetch data from APIs that communicate using HTTP, such as REST, SOAP, or GraphQL APIs. This tutorial covers the essentials of consuming REST APIs with Python, including authentication and handling responses.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand that:

  • An API is an interface that allows different systems to communicate, typically through requests and responses.
  • Python is a versatile language for consuming APIs, offering libraries like Requests to simplify the process.
  • REST and GraphQL are two common types of APIs, with REST being more widely used for public APIs.
  • To handle API authentication in Python, you can use API keys or more complex methods like OAuth to access protected resources.

Knowing how to consume an API is one of those magical skills that, once mastered, will crack open a whole new world of possibilities, and consuming APIs using Python is a great way to learn such a skill.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to use Python to consume most of the APIs that you come across. If you’re a developer, then knowing how to consume APIs with Python will empower you to integrate data from various online sources into your applications

You can download the source code for the examples that you’ll see in this tutorial by clicking the link below:

Getting to Know APIs

API stands for application programming interface. In essence, an API acts as a communication layer, or interface, that allows different systems to talk to each other without having to understand exactly what the others do.

APIs can come in many forms or shapes. They can be operating system APIs, used for actions like turning on your camera and audio when joining a Zoom call. Or they can be web APIs, used for web-focused actions, such as liking images on your Instagram or fetching the latest tweets.

No matter the type, all APIs function mostly the same way. You usually make a request for information or data, and the API returns a response with what you requested. For example, every time you open Twitter or scroll down your Instagram feed, you’re basically making a request to the API behind that app and getting a response in return. This is also known as calling an API.

In this tutorial, you’ll focus more on the high-level APIs that communicate across networks, also called web APIs.

SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL

Even though some of the examples above are geared toward newer platforms or apps, web APIs have been around for quite a long time. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, two different design models became the norm in exposing data publicly:

  1. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is typically associated with the enterprise world, has a stricter contract-based usage, and is mostly designed around actions.
  2. REST (Representational State Transfer) is typically used for public APIs and is ideal for fetching data from the Web. It’s much lighter and closer to the HTTP specification than SOAP.

Nowadays, there’s a new kid in town: GraphQL. Created by Facebook, GraphQL is a very flexible query language for APIs, where the clients decide exactly what they want to fetch from the server instead of letting the server decide what to send.

If you want to learn more about the differences between these three design models, then here are a few good resources:

Even though GraphQL is on the rise and is being adopted by bigger and bigger companies, including GitHub and Shopify, the truth is that the majority of public APIs are still REST APIs. Therefore, for the purpose of this tutorial, you’ll learn only about REST APIs and how to consume them using Python.

APIs and requests: A Match Made in Heaven

When consuming APIs with Python, there’s only one library you need: requests. With it, you should be able to do most, if not all, of the actions required to consume any public API.

You can install requests by running the following command in your console:

Shell
$ python -m pip install requests

The examples in this tutorial have been tested with Python 3.13.1 and requests 2.32.3. However, any supported version of Python and requests should yield similar results.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-api/ »


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February 01, 2025 at 07:30PM
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