APIs

• Manually gather data from web or crawling from the web can be a bit tedious
• some major website like Twitter provide API to access their database
• some API type is REST , and used by major companies like Twitter.
• More detailed please follor introduction to data wrangling in MongoDB

• To get the data from example, http://www.last.fm/api we just need to include this url, and modify the value after the question mark
• to change in this API, method, api_key, artist and album

• This is what looks like in JSON, like python dictionary.
• There's key and value, value could be another JSON

• Let's go through all the commands
• First, we specify what the url are
• Then we input the url to request and get it as text
• The text itself will be format JSON with some difficulty format to read
• We can create the parser, or get it automatically with python built itn
• json.loads will receiving input as string, and treat it as JSON format.
• the JSON.loads will parsing the JSON data to python dictionary
• Finally, we can print the data, as well as the value of the key 'artist'