API Calls in R

Published in

Trevor French

1 min readAug 4, 2022

🤘 Here’s a quick guide on making API calls in R featuring Helium data.

Outline

Install Packages
Require Packages
Make Request
Parse & Explore Data
Adding Parameters to Requests
Adding Headers to Requests

Pass a URL into the ‘GET’ function and store the response in a variable called ‘res’.

Response [https://api.helium.io/v1/stats]
  Date: 2022-08-04 01:25
  Status: 200
  Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
  Size: 922 B

Use the ‘fromJSON’ function from the ‘jsonlite’ package to parse the response data and then print out the names in the resulting data set.

[1] "data"

Go one level deeper into the data set and print out the names again.

[1] "token_supply"     "election_times"   "counts"           "challenge_counts" "block_times"

Alternatively, you can loop through the names as follows:

[1] "token_supply"
[1] "election_times"
[1] "counts"
[1] "challenge_counts"
[1] "block_times"

Get the ‘token_supply’ field from the data.

[1] 124675821

Add ‘min_time’ and ‘max_time’ as parameters on a different endpoint and print the resulting ‘fee’ data.

[1] 10112755000

Execute the same query as above except this time specify headers. This will likely be necessary when working with an API which requires an API Key.

[1] 10112755000