Consuming APIs with requests

16 min 35 XP

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Lesson 3 of 5 · View course roadmap

Step 1

Learn the idea

The requests library is the gold standard for calling APIs from Python (install with pip install requests):

import requests

resp = requests.get("https://api.github.com/users/ada-lovelace")
resp.raise_for_status()        # crash loudly on 4xx/5xx
data = resp.json()             # parsed JSON → dict
print(data["public_repos"])

resp.status_code, resp.json(), resp.text
Query params: requests.get(url, params={"q": "python"})
Sending data: requests.post(url, json={"name": "Ada"})
Auth: usually a header — headers={"Authorization": "Bearer TOKEN"}
Always set a timeout=10 in production code

Note: the browser sandbox can't make real network calls, so the challenge simulates a response — the parsing skills are identical.

Where you'll use this

requests is the most-downloaded Python package in history. Fetch-parse-handle is the core loop of price trackers, chatbots, data pipelines and every integration ('sync our CRM with our billing').

Common mistakes

No timeout: requests.get(url) can hang forever on a dead server — production code always passes timeout=.
Calling .json() on an error page → JSONDecodeError; check resp.status_code or call resp.raise_for_status() first.
Building query strings by hand with f-strings — params={...} handles encoding of spaces and special characters correctly.

Pro tip

Hammering an API in a loop gets you rate-limited (429) or banned. Real integrations add a small time.sleep() between calls and back off exponentially on 429/5xx responses.

Step 2

Try it yourself

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The lesson example is loaded and ready — press Run, then change something and run it again. Breaking it is part of learning. Want a clean slate? Tap “New blank”.

PYexample.py

⌘ + Enter to run

Output appears here…

Step 3

Pass the challenge +35 XP

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The starter simulates an API returning weather for three cities. Loop through the results and print each city with its temperature as City: temp°C, then print the warmest city's name.

Target output

Vilnius: 22°C
Madrid: 31°C
Oslo: 14°C
Madrid

PYchallenge.py

response = {
    "status": 200,
    "results": [
        {"city": "Vilnius", "temp": 22},
        {"city": "Madrid", "temp": 31},
        {"city": "Oslo", "temp": 14},
    ],
}
for r in response["results"]:
    print(f"{r['city']}: {r['temp']}°C")
warmest = max(response["results"], key=lambda r: r["temp"])
print(warmest["city"])

Run your code to check it…

Step 4

Check your understanding

1. What does resp.json() return? A JSON string Parsed Python objects (dict/list) Raw bytes A file

2. Where does a Bearer token usually go? The URL path The Authorization header A cookie only The request body

Last step

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