Using an API

An API is a set of instructions that programs can use to talk to each other. In web development, these instructions are usually defined as a set of urls that can take different parameters.

To make a Twitter bot, you might use an API to collect boring data and do something interesting to it. For example, @how2butt uses the url from the MediaWiki API to find a random WikiHow article. Then, in order to make the world a better place, it replaces one of the words in the article's title with "butt."

Let's use a simpler example to look at how an API works. Try visiting the url in your browser.

This url is an endpoint of the Pokéapi. It has extensive documentation at which describes all the different kinds of urls you can use to see Pokemon data.

The pile of text you're seeing is JSON, a data format that most programming languages can understand.

"I'm machine-readable!"

We can use Python's requests and json libraries to read from JSON urls like this one:

Now all you have to do is pass the text you've created to Tweepy. You can read data from pretty much any API just using requests.get() and json()!

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