Introduction

In this assignment we have been asked to use the New York Times Developer API to obtain information and pull it into a R data frame.

Retrieve API Key

I will be storing the API Key in the local keychain of my computer, I will use the keyring package to access the key.

api.key<-  keyring::key_get("ny_times_api_key_data607")

Using the Top Stories API

For the first example I will use the Top Stories API, to load the top science stories.

url <- paste("https://api.nytimes.com/svc/topstories/v2/science.json?api-key=", api.key)

rawDataFromTopStoriesApi <- fromJSON(url,flatten = T)
resultsDataFrameTopStories <- rawDataFromTopStoriesApi$results

resultsDataFrameTopStories %>% 
  select( title,section, short_url, abstract) %>% 
  datatable()

Display Results Graphically

I will now make a bar graph showing the number of articles per section.

resultsDataFrameTopStories %>% ggplot(aes(x=section)) +geom_bar()

Conclusion

As can be seen, it is quite useful and simple to access data using an API that returns JSON.