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JSON and APIs with Python
An Introduction to JSON and APIs using Python
Introduction
In a different tutorial, we discussed how to web scrape with python. The goal of web scraping was to access data from a website or webpage. Well, sometimes a website can make it easier for a user to have direct access to their data with the use of an API (Application Programming Interface). This basically means that the company has made a set of dedicated URLs that provide this data in a pure form (meaning without any presentation formatting). This pure data is often in a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, which we can then parse through and extract what we need using python.
For this tutorial, we will use the free API found at covid19api.com that provides data on the coronavirus. We will find the total number of confirmed cases in each country and then we will create a pandas dataframe that contains that information. So let’s begin!
