Week9Assignment

Rathish Parayil Sasidharan

Overview

The New York Times web site provides a rich set of APIs, as described here: [https://developer.nytimes.com/apis] You’ll need to start by signing up for an API key. Your task is to choose one of the New York Times APIs, construct an interface in R to read in the JSON data, and transform it into an R DataFrame.

Movie Reviews API

For this assignment we will be using API to Get movie reviews that are critics’ picks:

/reviews/picks.json

Prerequisite

Create a developer account on the developer.nytimes.com and register an application and sign up for API Key

Load the required libraries

library('jsonlite')
library('httr')
library('tidyverse')

Read the API Key

Read the API key provided by New York Time while registering the app

pwfile <- "apiKey.txt"
if ( file.exists(pwfile) )
{
  apiKeyValue <- readLines(pwfile)
}else 
{
  apiKeyValue <- rstudioapi::askForPassword( prompt = "Please enter API key:" ) 
}

Construct URL by appending the API Key

Append the API key to the base url

nytmoviePickBaseUrl <- 'https://api.nytimes.com/svc/movies/v2/reviews/picks.json'
finalUrl <- paste0(nytmoviePickBaseUrl,"?api-key=", apiKeyValue)

Read the data and display the results

moviePicksJson <-read_json(finalUrl, simplifyVector = TRUE)


moviePicksJson$status

## [1] "OK"

#Check the http status code
if(moviePicksJson$status =='OK'){
     #Select first 8 columns and create a new data frame
     moviePicksJsonDf <- moviePicksJson$results %>% select(1:8)
     DT::datatable(moviePicksJsonDf)
}

Summary

Successfully retrieved the top movie reviews that are critics picks by using the developer API Converted the json data into data frame