Question

I want to get data from an API using Python. The API documentation give examples in CURL and Ruby. I would be very happy if you can post code snippets on how to do the following things with Python.

To get authentication token:

Curl example:

curl -X POST -d "{\"username\" : \"[e-mail]\", \"password\":\"sample\"}" http://api.sample.com/authenticate

Ruby example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'rest_client'
require 'json'

class AuthorizationClient
  attr_accessor :base_url

  def initialize(base_url)
    @base_url = base_url
  end

  def authenticate(username,password)
    login_data = { 'username' => username, 'password' => password}.to_json
    begin
      JSON.parse(RestClient.post "#{@base_url}/authenticate", login_data, :content_type => :json, :accept => :json)['output']
    rescue Exception => e
      JSON.pretty_generate JSON.parse e.http_body
    end
  end
end

client = AuthorizationClient.new('http://api.sample.com/authenticate')
puts client.authenticate('[e-mail]','sample')

After authentication, to get data:

CURL example:

curl http://api.sample.com/data/day/2011-02-10/authToken/80afa08-1254-46ee-9545-afasfa4565

And Ruby code:

require 'rubygems'
require 'rest_client'
require 'json'

class ReportingClient
  attr_accessor :auth_token, :base_url

  def initialize(base_url)
    @base_url = base_url
  end

  def authenticate(username,password)
    login_data = { 'username' => username, 'password' => password}.to_json

    response = RestClient.post "#{@base_url}/authenticate", login_data, :content_type => :json, :accept => :json
    @auth_token = JSON.parse(response)['output']
  end

  def get_report(start_date, end_date)
    response = RestClient.get "#{@base_url}/data/day/#{day}/authToken/#{auth_token}"
    JSON.parse(response)
  end

end

client = ReportingClient.new('http://api.sample.com:20960')
client.authenticate('[e-mail]','sample')

results = client.get_report('2011-02-10')

puts JSON.pretty_generate(results)

Thank you..

PS: I am aware of pycurl. But I am not sure if I really need it. I am happy with using Python native libraries. Pycurl might be over-kill for my needs.

I am new to Python and I couldn’t find the right solution after reading ‘urllib2’ documentation and trying examples.

Answer 1

This is not a port but it looks like you are sending a POST and then obtaining the authorization token and then sending a GET request using this.
This is based on what I understood.

import urllib
import urllib2
import simplejson
import datetime

authURL = "http://api.sample.com/authenticate"
values = {"username" : "[e-mail]",
          "password" : "sample"}

data = urllib.urlencode(values)

req = urllib2.Request(authURL, data)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)

authToken = simplejson.load(response)["output"]

day = str(datetime.date.today())
dataURL = "http://api.sample.com/data/day/" + day + "/authToken/" + authToken

print simplejson.load(urllib2.urlopen(dataURL))