Data607-Week09-Web APIs

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New York Times web APIs

The New York Times web site provides a rich set of APIs, as described here; For this assignment I have chosen Article Search API from New York Times web APIs; we will construct an interface in R to read in the JSON data, and transform it into an R DataFrame.

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Article Search API

Overview: Use the Article Search API to look up articles by keyword. You can refine your search using filters and facets.

Example Call: https://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=election&api-key=yourkey

Filtering Your Search: Use filters to narrow the scope of your search. You can specify the fields and the values that your query will be filtered on.

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Reading JSON data

1. Read/Search for coronavirus+baseball in Source as The New York Times and news_desk as Sports:

# Creating the search url for the API request call:
theJsonUrl <- paste(ArticleSearchApiUrl,'fq=coronavirus+baseball  AND source:("The New York Times") AND news_desk:("Sports")&begin_date=20200327&end_date=20200327&sort=newest&api-key=',MyKey, sep = '')

# Fetching the reponse from the call:
JsonUrldata <- getURL(theJsonUrl)

json.data <- fromJSON(JsonUrldata)

# Creating a dataframe with select columns:
json.df <- data.frame(json.data$`response`) %>%
  select (docs.abstract, docs.web_url, docs.snippet, docs.source, docs.pub_date, docs.document_type,  docs.news_desk, docs.section_name, docs.subsection_name, docs.word_count, meta.hits)

# Row count and Data view:
nrow(json.df)

## [1] 3

datatable(json.df)

2. Read/Search for coronavirus+baseball in all Source and in all news_desk:

# Creating the search url for the API request call:
theJsonUrl <- paste(ArticleSearchApiUrl,'fq=coronavirus+baseball&begin_date=20200327&end_date=20200327&sort=newest&api-key=',MyKey, sep = '')

# Fetching the reponse from the call:
JsonUrldata <- getURL(theJsonUrl)

json.data.all <- fromJSON(JsonUrldata)

# Creating a dataframe with select columns:
json.df.all <- data.frame(json.data.all$`response`) %>%
  select (docs.abstract, docs.web_url, docs.snippet, docs.source, docs.pub_date, docs.document_type,  docs.news_desk, docs.section_name, docs.subsection_name, docs.word_count, meta.hits)

# Row count and Data view:
nrow(json.df.all)

## [1] 10

datatable(json.df.all)

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