Accessing APIs

Here, we see a generic example of how to access an API and parse some basic values from the return values:

import requests
city="london"
#this would give a sample data of the city that was used in the variable
 urlx="https://samples.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q="+city+"&appid=b6907d289e10d714a6e88b30761fae22"
#send the request to URL using GET Method
 r = requests.get(url = urlx)
 output=r.json()
#parse the valuable information from the return JSON
 print ("Raw JSON \n")
 print (output)
 print ("\n")
#fetch and print latitude and longitude
 citylongitude=output['coord']['lon']
 citylatitude=output['coord']['lat']
 print ("Longitude: "+str(citylongitude)+" , "+"Latitude: "+str(citylatitude))

The sample output is as follows:

>>>
 Raw JSON
{'coord': {'lon': -0.13, 'lat': 51.51}, 'weather': [{'id': 300, 'main': 'Drizzle', 'description': 'light intensity drizzle', 'icon': '09d'}], 'base': 'stations', 'main': {'temp': 280.32, 'pressure': 1012, 'humidity': 81, 'temp_min': 279.15, 'temp_max': 281.15}, 'visibility': 10000, 'wind': {'speed': 4.1, 'deg': 80}, 'clouds': {'all': 90}, 'dt': 1485789600, 'sys': {'type': 1, 'id': 5091, 'message': 0.0103, 'country': 'GB', 'sunrise': 1485762037, 'sunset': 1485794875}, 'id': 2643743, 'name': 'London', 'cod': 200}

Longitude: -0.13, Latitude: 51.51
 >>>

Using the requests library, we fetch the sample weather information from an open API (public API) for London, England. The output returned is JSON, which we print first as raw (that is, print the output exactly as we got it back), and then parse out the meaningful info (the city's latitude and longitude) from the JSON payload.