Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 10: Movie Search App
Lecture: Exploring the search API

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0:00 Let's just play around with this api really quick,
0:02 get the general idea of it and then we'll structure into a proper program, ok?
0:07 So our url is going to look something like this
0:09 and we search for capital
0:11 and so let's make it really clear that there is some search text that goes right there.
0:16 So we'll say search=this and then we'll do a .format(), with the search.
0:21 Now what we are going to do is we are going to work wit Request
0:23 we've used that a few times and it's been really great,
0:26 we are also going to work with named tuples again,
0:28 so while I am here let me just type import collections.
0:31 So what I want to do is go and download this data
0:34 so we'll say r for response=request.get(url).
0:38 Now, I should test our .status code and all those things
0:42 but we are just playing around,
0:45 so I am going to pull this back and say
0:45 the data is going to come back in json format
0:47 so instead of taking that as a string,
0:49 we are going to convert that to dictionaries and lists
0:53 and primary sort of fundamental values like numbers and dates and so on.
0:58 So remember how the results come back,
1:00 there is an outer json object, a dictionary, it has a key called Search, capital S
1:06 it is case sensitive, and in there, there is an array,
1:08 and this is what we are really after.
1:10 So let's go over here and we'll say results and just write this
1:14 like it's going to work and then we can add error handling, later.
1:17 So we'll say data, and we want the search item
1:19 and that should be our list of dictionaries at the moment,
1:23 and we are going to upgrade them, so hold on, let's just print out,
1:26 let's just assume this is going to work,
1:28 let's say what's the length of the results, 10 movies, ok,
1:32 well what is the first one that we found,
1:35 remember, we are searching for Capital,
1:38 there it is, we have some movie in 2013
1:41 and we can just pull this up I guess, and see what it looks like,
1:44 human capital, ok,
1:46 so that's and there it is, we have human capital at the top.
1:49 So this is ok but if you look at things like, if you look at them
1:54 like maybe we want to say order them by year, or something like this,
1:58 and if you look at a movie here,
2:03 you'll see that we have a bunch of information
2:06 and we have like a year and that is a string.
2:09 So, we probably want to parse that, and again,
2:11 the only way to get to this is to actually type things like year as a string.
2:16 It would be much nicer to have like a proper named tuple
2:20 and we are going to create a named tuple from this dictionary
2:24 but we are going to do it in a really cool way, so let's define our movie result,
2:30 it's going to be a collection.named tuple again,
2:33 so for this to work in the cool and sleek way that I am proposing,
2:37 the values need to have exactly the same name as they do in the dictionary,
2:42 and they are not really matching Pythonic style with lower case elements,
2:46 upper case, more something like C# or C++
2:50 but we are going to make it work here.
2:53 All right, so let's take this and instead of having this dictionary that we use strings against,
2:58 we'll have a strongly typed element called movie results, right,
3:02 so let's roll this back and let's just loop remember this little list,
3:05 let's loop over every one of these and convert it into a movie result,
3:08 so I am going to write this maybe the less pythonic way, in two axes,
3:13 in two dimensions if you will,
3:15 and then I'll show you two cool ways to improve this
3:18 so we are going to have a list,
3:21 we are going to say for result in results:, plural,
3:24 now I want to create a movie, it's going to be a movie result
3:28 and in here we want to say things like title=results['Title'],
3:33 and we can just knock this out like so,
3:38 ok so now we have a movie result,
3:40 let me just print out m as we loop across these so let's run this, ok,
3:44 it looks like I misspelled something, hold on, here we go,
3:49 so we've gone to the url,
3:52 we've downloaded the data we've parsed the text into json,
3:57 we went to our json which was converted to a dictionary,
4:00 we pulled out the item that was under the key search
4:03 which turns out to be a list of subdictionaries,
4:06 each one of those we are calling the results
4:08 and they each have a title, poster, type and so on,
4:11 we are converting that or upgrading it if you will into a movie result
4:15 and if we print it we can see them there, that's great,
4:19 but what we wanted to do is actually store these into our list
4:22 so we'll say movies.append(m), and then down at the bottom,
4:27 let's just print out the first one again.
4:32 print(movies[0]), awesome,
4:34 so you can see our movie result was converted properly
4:35 title is this poster is that and so on.