Working API Data and Web Scraping

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Materials We Provide

Topic	Description	Link
Lesson	Part 1: APIs	Here
Lesson	Part 2: Webscraping	Here

Please note: This lesson makes use of datasets from the requests library. The webscraping-ii module requires selenium and geckodriver and is best taught using Google Chrome.

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Learning Objectives

Part 1: Intro to Web Services & APIs

After this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify relevant HTTP Verbs & their uses.
• Describe Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and know how to make calls and consume API data.
• Access public APIs and get information back.
• Read and write data in JSON format.
• Demonstrate how to use the requests library.

Part 2: Webscraping in Class

After this lesson, students will be able to:

• Revisit how to locate elements on a webpage
• Aquire unstructured data from the internet using BeautifulSoup.
• Discuss limitations associated with simple requests and urllib libraries

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Student Requirements

Before this lesson(s), students should already be able to:

• Interpret and use Python dictionaries
• Build Pandas DataFrames from dictionaries
• Perform simple data manipulation on Pandas objects\
• Build for and while loops in Python
• Use pip install for package management

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Lesson Outline

Outline: Part 1 (APIs)

• Introduction to APIs
• What is an API?
• Web APIs
• Making API calls
• HTTP
• Independent practice: HTTP
• HTTP Request
  • HTTP Request methods
  • HTTP Request structure
• HTTP Response
  • Response types overview
• JSON
• Guided practice: pulling data from APIs
  • Example: Star Wars
• Closing questions

Outline: Part 2 (Web Scraping in Class)

• Introduction to Web Scraping
• Building a web scraper
• Retrieving data from the HTML page
  • Retrieving the restaurant names
  • Challenge: Retrieving the restaurant locations
  • Retrieving the restaurant prices
  • Retrieving the restaurant number of bookings
• Summary

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Installation Notes

When running this lesson, please check the following environment requirements:

1. Have Beautiful Soup installed: pip install bs4

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Additional Resources

For more information on this topic, check out the following resources:

• Using selenium to scrape rendered text: Selenium docs
• Using Selenium to enter website information: demo
• Python regex tester: here