REST API: Data Extraction with Python - without Web Scraping
- 2 hours on-demand video
- 6 articles
- 3 downloadable resources
- 1 coding exercise
- Full lifetime access
- Access on mobile and TV
- Assignments
- Certificate of Completion
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- Using Postman to test API requests before writing your code
- Handling different types of authentication required by APIs
- Completing practical projects to extract currency exchange rates and business details and reviews using popular APIs
- Source codes (*.py files) for all Exercises can be downloaded
- Q&A board to send your questions and get them answered quickly
There are so many REST clients available that can be used to interact with REST APIs and test requests before writing your code. Postman, is one of the world’s leading API Development Environment (ADE) with so many features baked in. In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to use Postman to make API calls with and without authorization.
In this Google Places API project, you will learn how to retrieve some information about places including place name, user reviews and ratings, address, phone number and website.
First, you need to search for places as stated before. So go to Google Maps and search for the area you are interested in and get the GPS coordinates that you will use in Google Places API to search the area for places of a specific type and retrieve their details and reviews.
- Some prior programming experience in Python (e.g. Data Structures and File Handling) will help.
- This course adopts a step-by-step approach and requires you to open a Python editor, download available *.py code files, and start applying the provided examples and exercises.
- Python 3: Codes of this course are tested on Python 3. It is up to you to adapt them if you want to run them in Python 2.
Do you want to extract data from a website? Before using web scraping, you have to check first if this website has an API that gives you access to the data you need. There are several popular platforms that give developers access to their “web services”, also known as “APIs”. So using APIs is the official way for data extraction and doing other automation stuff allowed by such applications. You can even benefit from some APIs to build your own applications. If an API allows you to get the data you want to extract from a website, then you do not need regular web scraping.
REST APIs usually generate output in JSON or XML format because most of programming languages can handle these formats easily. In fact, JSON is very similar to data types in programming languages; for example, it is very similar to Python dictionaries.
Some APIs require authentication to control their usage, using an API Key or Client ID and Client Secret, similar to a username and password, so to speak.
In this course, you will start by learning how to extract data using a very simple currency rate conversion API that does not require any authentication but it will teach you the fundamentals of using REST APIs. After that, you will study more advanced video tutorials on sophisticated APIs such as Yelp and Google Places. You will also learn how to use the REST API client, Postman, to test an API before writing your code.
By the end of this course, you will not only be able to apply the given practical examples, but you will also be able to apply the same fundamentals you learned to any other REST API to extract the data you need from popular websites. So let’s start.
Course Contributors, special thanks to:
Majid Alizadeh (Coding & Instructions)
Michael Bukachi (Coding & Instructions)
Yasmin Moslem (Coding & Instructions)
Yusuf Yurtsever (Video Creation & Narration)
- Those who want to learn how to use REST APIs and Python for data extraction and automation.