API access

Here, we call the weather API to get coordinates for a particular location (say London, England):

#use the city of london as a reference
 $city="london"
 $urlx="https://samples.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q="+$city+"&appid=b6907d289e10d714a6e88b30761fae22"
# used to Invoke API using GET method
 $stuff = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $urlx -Method Get
#write raw json
 $stuff
#write the output of latitude and longitude
 write-host ("Longitude: "+$stuff.coord.lon+" , "+"Latitude: "+$stuff.coord.lat)

The output is as follows:

PS C:\Users\abhishek.ratan> C:\gdrive\book2\github\edition2\chapter1\api_invoke_ps.ps1
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

As we can see in the code, a major difference between writing code in Python and PowerShell is that in PowerShell we do not need to focus on indentation. PowerShell does not care about indentation, whereas a Python compilation would fail if strict indentation was not adhered to.

Also, we do not need to import any specific library in PowerShell, as it has very extensive built-in functions that are directly callable from the script.