DATA 607 - Week 9 Homework

Libraries used

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
library(httr)
library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)

For this assignment, I used the “Times Newswire API”

This API is set up to hold an up to the minute stream of the latest articles published by the New York Times. This stream holds 20 of the latest articles.

# save the url with api-key
url <- "https://api.nytimes.com/svc/news/v3/content/all/all.json?api-key=SoV2EDJdCsYfjVcQeelgFOdkaAlJtPts"

Using the httr library to get the json data from the API

nyt <- GET(url)

Parsing the json data, and saving certain parts in vectors

details <- content(nyt, "parse")

# creating empty vectors to store results in the following for loop
titles = vector()
abstracts = vector()
sections = vector()
pb_date = vector()
urls = vector()

# iterating through the parsed results and storing data from various sections in vectors to be used later to combine into the final dataframe
for(i in 1:length(details$results)){
  titles[i] <- details$results[[i]]$title
  abstracts[i] <- details$results[[i]]$abstract
  sections[i] <- details$results[[i]]$section
  pb_date[i] <- details$results[[i]]$published_date
  urls[i] <- details$results[[i]]$url
}

Saving to a final data frame

# adding all of the vectors to a final dataframe
final_df <- data.frame(titles, abstracts, sections, pb_date, urls)

# printing the final dataframe
kable(final_df, align = rep('c', 5)) %>% 
  kable_styling(bootstrap_options = c("striped"), full_width = F)

Similar work in python

I also decided to build this out in Python as well, to gain a little more experience working with the Pandas library and python code. If interested, you can find my code at this Jupyter Notebook file on my GitHub repository as the .ipynb file.

An html version of this file is also at the same location as above.