Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 10: Movie Search App
Lecture: Exploring the search API
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Now we know where our data is coming from
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let's write some code and get started on this app.
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We're going to do it in two steps, so let's take this url here
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this movie service.talkpython.fm/api/search/ the name there
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and let's go over here and we're just going to write
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some sort of play around code in the beginning
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and then we'll structure this into a proper program or proper app in a minute.
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So we're going to go and make a request against this
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and let's make it really clear that there is a search term happening here
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so we'll say format search, search equals this, I'll search for a capital
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and we're going to need to make a request against this service,
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well, we've already seen one of the best ways to do that
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is to use the request package, so import request;
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now I don't have request installed in the virtual environment here
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so we'll go ahead and install that,
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you might be using it your system wide Python
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and have it left over from other examples
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or maybe using the same virtual environment
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but here I'm an going to install it separately;
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we're also going to be using named tuples,
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so I'm going to import collections while we're at it,
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so let's start by going and doing a request against this,
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so we'll say the response is request.get url,
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and then let's just print out the status code
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and go ahead and run this, see what we get.
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Status code 200, that's good, so we could
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actually print out the text that we got back
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that looks like the javascripty json text that we're looking for,
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we could use the json module and parse that,
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but it turns out that if we have let's say I have a variable here
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it turns out that request is very commonly used to talk to these javascript apis
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and it can automatically turn this into the python dictionaries
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that we're going to work with, so now I could print out this
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let's say the type of movie data and maybe data, we'll see what we get back
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so if we run this, we get a dictionary, not the strings, but an actual dictionary
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which we can use to start working with this data.
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So notice we have our keyword capital in our hits
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which is an array of these movies,
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so we're already on a good path here,
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we probably should do some kind of check to make sure everything is ok
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and we could say something like if response.status code is not 200,
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do something, but request has a nice little thing here
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we can say response.raise for status
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so this is going to cause an error an exception
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if something went wrong basically if it's not a successful status code, all right
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and we'll talk about how to handle these types of situations in a little bit
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but for now, let's just keep playing around with this.
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So we've got our movie data, and we actually care about our movies
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and that's going to be going to the movie data
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and we want to get out the hits,
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so let's print out our movies here and see what we get.
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Now this time it shouldn't come back as a dictionary,
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notice the square bracket, this should come back as an array, a list;
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so here's a list, and then these are all of the movies,
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now the next thing we want to do is convert them just from these flat dictionaries
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into something that's more useful for application,
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we've already seen that named tuples are really powerful
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and let us work with data better,
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we could go and create classes like we did in the wizard app,
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but I think probably named tuples are good enough
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for what we're trying to do here, so let's go and set that up.
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Let's call this a movie result and we're going to set that to be a collection.named tuple,
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and we need the name right here to be exactly the same so movie results,
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and then the next thing that goes in here is actually
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a list of all of the fields, and you can see we have rating
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we have duration, we have title, we have imdb code
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and it needs to match up, well, it should match up exactly to this,
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to make it as easy as possible, we could of course transform it
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and if we don't want imdb code we just want to say
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imdb or just code or something like that,
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we could change it but we have to account for that later;
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so our plan is to just use the same field names or attribute names here,
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so I've already copied those over, so you don't have to watch me type them in,
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so we have this movie result and let's go instead of printing these out,
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let's actually go and loop over all of this data that we got back
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and build up a list of these movie results,
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so let's rename this to movie list or something like that
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and then we'll define our movies, this is the thing we really are after
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we really want to work with, we're going to add a bunch of these movie results
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converted from the data we got from the web service.
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So we'll say for md in a movie list, all right
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and then we want to come down here
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and we're going to create one of the movie results
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and I'm going to do this in three different ways,
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I'm going to start out in the most sort of verbose least Pythonic way
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and we're going to improve it in the next video in a couple of different ways.
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So we're going to say m is a movie result,
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then we need to set a bunch of stuff,
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we need to set the imdb code is equal to md.get,
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imdb code we're going to come over here
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and we're going to set the title to be the title
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and I'm just going to knock the rest of these out.
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There we go, that was a lot of typing
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so we've got all of these here and some of these are numbers
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so we might want to be a little careful we could say things like the score
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if you don't have it in here in this dictionary get
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instead of giving us none you could give us zero,
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same maybe for the year or the rating, things like that
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but this is not entirely necessary I believe all of them have a year and rating.
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Okay, so now we're just going to say movies.append,
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and give it this m, so now we could do things like this
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we could just print out something about the movies,
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so we can print them out and something like this
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we could say, we could just put the year and the title
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we could also save print found some number of movies for search something like this
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the length of the movies and the search string that we sent in, okay,
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so let's run this one more time
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and we should go find a couple movies for capital
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and then print them out here. Look at that, searching for capital,
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we get Supercapitalist, Capital C and Capitalism A Love Story,
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let's go and search for a runner, oh look at that,
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we found Blade Runner, Kite Runner, Logan's Run,
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let's make it feel a little more real, I had let the user input something here,
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so let it come down here, alright,
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so now we could do blade for Blade Runner or something like that,
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we got Sling Blade, Dragon Blade, Blade Runner,
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we come down here and look for a runner, get these again beautiful
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all right so it looks like this is working,
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we'll see that we can actually improve upon this in a couple of ways,
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make this much more concise and pythonic.
