Question

…just wanted to confirm that since the latest soundcloud api does not provide a data interface, we are left with parsing the results from an http request.

my concern is that the resulting structure could change at anytime and thus render my parsing schema invalid. is anyone else doing something similar? or better?

Answer 1

This is correct. All SoundCloud API responses will be serialized as JSON or XML. We take backwards compatibility pretty seriously, so you can rely on the format and data returned.

Most languages have at least one library capable of automatically parsing JSON into an appropriate data type (i.e. an array of hashes). You can always check to ensure a key exists before you try to access it, for example in Python:

import json
import urllib

url = 'https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks.json'

fp = urllib.urlopen('%s?%s' % (url, urllib.urlencode({
    'client_id': 'YOUR_CLIENT_ID',
    'limit': 2
})))
data = fp.read()

tracks = json.loads(data)
for track in tracks:
    print track.get('title', 'No title available')

Does that help answer your question?