Data 607 HW 9

Assignment Web APIs

Below, we will connect to the New York Times movie reviews API, search for movies containing the string “Star Wars”, and create a dataframe.

Here I declare a function that takes a string keyword corresponding to the movie we want to search for and ouputs the URL that returns those results.

The fromJSON() function is used to read the data, and a dataframe is created with the following columns:

• title
• mpaa_rating
• byline
• summary_short
• opening_date
• url

nytquery <- function(keywords){
    queryelem <-  str_c(c("query=",URLencode(keywords)), collapse="")
    apiKey <- "UR7fDqc0nEUYw8XFye8qtSGOo5zTH8PR"
    base_url <- "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/movies/v2/reviews/search.json?api-key="
    url <- str_c(c(base_url, apiKey,"&", 
    queryelem), collapse = "")
    return(url)
}

query <- nytquery("Star Wars")
results <- fromJSON(query)

results_df <- results$results %>% subset(select=c(display_title,mpaa_rating,byline,summary_short,opening_date))

results_df$url <- results$results$link$url
results_df$opening_date <- as.Date(results_df$opening_date)
results_df <- results_df[order(results_df$opening_date),]

DT::datatable(results_df)