Getting the Data from the Web using PHP or Python for API

In the previous posts [1],[2] perl was used to get content from the web through Faroo API and Guardian APIs. In this post PHP and Pyhton will be used to get web data using same APIs.

PHP has a powerful JSON parsing mechanism, which, because PHP is a dynamic language, enables PHP developers to program against a JSON object graph in a very straightforward way. [3] In the PHP example code shown here we do not need any additional library or module in PHP script while Perl code required some modules such as LWP, HTTP, JSON.

Below is PHP code example to make API call to search function and display web title and link for returned results. You can also see online running example of PHP API script



<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
$request = "http://content.guardianapis.com/search?format=json&api-key=xxxxxxxx&page-size=10&page=1&q=" . urlencode( $_POST["searchText"]);
$response  = file_get_contents($request);
  // to view in plain text:
  //echo  ($response); 
$jsonobj  = json_decode($response);
           
 for($i=0; $i<10; $i++)
 {
   echo( $jsonobj ->response->results[$i]->webTitle);
   echo( "
");
   $s1=$jsonobj ->response->results[$i]->webUrl;
   echo( "<a href=".$s1." target='_blank'>".$s1."</a>");
   echo( "<br><br>");
 }
} 
?>

Python is a widely used powerful programming language. It’s extremely popular in data science, machine learning and bioinformatics. Many websites are built around the Django Python framework. Below is the comparison of trends over the 10+ years for Python, PHP and Perl.

Trend for Python, Perl, PHP
Trend for Python, Perl, PHP

Data Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends).”

And here is the python code to make API call and display data for returned results. The example was developed and tested on Anaconda/Spider(Python 3.5) environment.


import requests


resp=requests.get("http://www.faroo.com/api?q=analytics&start=1&l=en&src=web&f=json&key=xxxx&jsoncallback=?")
if resp.status_code != 200:
  print ("Something went wrong")
  exit();      

message=resp.json().get('results')
# to see in plain text all results enable next line
# print (message)    
print ("\n\n\n")
for item in message:
        #to see everything related to item enable next line
        #print (item)
        print (item['url'])
        print (item['title'])
        print (item['kwic'])
        print ("\n\n")

References
1.Getting Data from the Web with Perl and The Guardian API
2.Getting Data from the Web with Perl and Faroo API
3.Using the API with PHP
4.Online running example of PHP API script



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