New York Times Web API

About the Assignment

In the Assignment I created an API key for New York Times database to read articles. Amongst the numerous articles, I chose to request for the most viewed articles for the last seven days.The response was received as a JSON data which I converted into a dataframe.

Approach

I signed up with the New York Times and created an API key to enable me send a request to the New York Times server through the GET() function of the httr package and the response was saved in an object named article. The object was displayed to view its status, content-type, date and etc. The status was 200 and the content-type was in application/json format. The status and content information signified that there was a connection for the server to send the json formatted request. I displayed the header to have an overview of the article object. Then the unicode formatted content of the object was converted to a character vector with the content() function parsed with as argument equals text before parsing it the fromJSON() function. The fromJSON() function converts the json formatted content into a dataframe of articles, copyright, number of articles, and status.

Send Request to get most viewed articles for the last seven days and save the response in a variable

url_viewed <-"https://api.nytimes.com/svc/mostpopular/v2/viewed/1.json?api-key=jsWenA4LsyGDPE3LOkNnt4kxlQbG1clD"
article <- GET(url_viewed)

Display response

article

## Response [https://api.nytimes.com/svc/mostpopular/v2/viewed/1.json?api-key=jsWenA4LsyGDPE3LOkNnt4kxlQbG1clD]
##   Date: 2021-10-24 23:03
##   Status: 200
##   Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
##   Size: 37.4 kB

article_header <- article$headers
article_header

## $date
## [1] "Sun, 24 Oct 2021 23:03:11 GMT"
## 
## $`content-type`
## [1] "application/json; charset=utf-8"
## 
## $`transfer-encoding`
## [1] "chunked"
## 
## $connection
## [1] "keep-alive"
## 
## $`cache-control`
## [1] "max-age=60"
## 
## $`x-nyt-most-popular-values`
## [1] "VIEWED 1"
## 
## $`x-request-id`
## [1] "1635116584580724074"
## 
## $`content-encoding`
## [1] "gzip"
## 
## $`x-cloud-trace-context`
## [1] "20a81bcc147744e63211b0405d12f8fd"
## 
## $server
## [1] "Google Frontend"
## 
## $`accept-ranges`
## [1] "bytes"
## 
## $via
## [1] "1.1 varnish"
## 
## $age
## [1] "6"
## 
## $`x-served-by`
## [1] "cache-fty21352-FTY"
## 
## $`x-cache`
## [1] "HIT"
## 
## $`x-cache-hits`
## [1] "1"
## 
## $`x-timer`
## [1] "S1635116591.091422,VS0,VE1"
## 
## $vary
## [1] "Accept-Encoding"
## 
## $`access-control-allow-origin`
## [1] "*"
## 
## $`access-control-allow-headers`
## [1] "Accept, Content-Type, X-Forwarded-For, X-Prototype-Version, X-Requested-With"
## 
## $`access-control-expose-headers`
## [1] "Content-Length, X-JSON"
## 
## $`access-control-allow-methods`
## [1] "GET, OPTIONS"
## 
## attr(,"class")
## [1] "insensitive" "list"

View the unicode

str(article$content)

##  raw [1:37403] 7b 22 73 74 ...

Convert the unicode to character vector

nyt_article<-content(article, as="text")
#nyt_article

Parse the character vector into a fromJSON to convert it to a list

nyt_articlent_json<-nyt_article %>% fromJSON
#glimpse(nyt_articlent_json)

The glimpse() was called to unbundle the content of the nyt_articlent_json list to view its elements. The list contains four elements, namely-status, copyright, num_results and results dataframe.

status

nyt_articlent_json$status

## [1] "OK"

copyright

nyt_articlent_json$copyright

## [1] "Copyright (c) 2021 The New York Times Company.  All Rights Reserved."

Number of observations

nyt_articlent_json$num_results

## [1] 20

Articles

samp_article<-nyt_articlent_json$results

kbl(samp_article)%>%
  kable_styling() %>% kable_paper("hover", full_width = F)

Conclusion

It is a nice assignment for students of data science in the age of globalization. I learnt a lot in the assignment and I recommend that anyone in quest to learn data science should avail himself to learn about APIs. Now, I have the opportunity to view the most viewed article of any week in the comfort of my home with a click of my computer mouse.