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Technology is changing the scope of work, and automation is one way to do tasks faster with less time and effort.
With advanced tools and programming languages like Python, it is possible to learn to automate things like file operations, spreadsheets, email, file and directory management, and even work with different APIs to get desired information as structured data like JSON, XML, CSV (comma-separated value) and so on.
Developers are always looking for ways to improve and make the software development life cycle more efficient. Python, with its simple syntax and ability to process and handle complex tasks, is a handy tool for this purpose.
The Role of Automation
Automation involves creating scripts and applications that automatically perform repetitive tasks without human intervention or assistance.
If you work with large datasets or do manual tasks to compute data, automation is valuable for:
- Software development
- Marketing professionals
- Data science
- Business analysts and financial analysts
The following guide will help you understand how to interact with APIs to take automation to the next level. It will also help you integrate an API into a program to fetch its data sources and generate a list of CSV trivia questions on demand, along with the answers, using the Trivia API.
Setup and Installation
To ensure your scripts can handle connecting and retrieving information from websites and APIs (server), the Python requests module is required:
pip install requests
The requests module is an HTTP library for exchanging information over the internet.
The other modules, csv and html come pre-installed as part of the Python standard library.
csv: This module creates a CSV file.html: This helps to decode or unescape html entities or ASCII characters into their original characters in plain text.
Building the Trivia QA Project
First, let’s set up the program by creating a file called main.py in any code editor you choose. This program will run in your terminal’s CLI.
Make sure the file is contained within a folder.
main.py
import requests
import csv
import html
These three libraries will do all the work for the program, including sending the HTTP requests and writing the response to a CSV file.
Next, let’s prompt the user to do the following with the input function:
amount = input("Please enter the number of trivia questions you'd like to see: ")
This allows the user to enter the number of trivia questions they’d like to see
Also, prompt the user to specify the difficulty of the questions:
difficulty = input("Please specify how difficult you'd like the questions to be (easy/medium/hard): ")
Define the API endpoint
Use the Open Trivia Database as shown in the URL variable:
url = “https://opentdb.com/api.php”
Set Up Request Parameters
Request parameters offer a structured way to send additional or optional information through key-value pairs that append to an API URL after the question mark. Therefore, the request parameter allows both the client and the server to have a more specific interaction, enabling the server to return data that is aligned more closely with what the client or user is looking for.
Define and set the following request parameters to the request_paramsvariable:
request_params = {
“amount”: amount,
“difficulty”: difficulty,
“category”: “18”,
}
The value for each key in the request_params represents information like amount, difficulty and category from the Trivia API. The category value set to “18” relates to the “Science: Computers” question category.
Requesting JSON and Extracting the Data With Python
To fetch data from a web server, the GET request is paired to the Trivia API using the requests library:
request_params = {
“amount”: amount,
“difficulty”: difficulty,
“category”: “18”,
}
The response variable accepts the API URL, headers that format the server’s data as JSON and the parameters dictionary.
To extract the trivia data, parse the response as JSON using the .json method of the response object:
data = response.json()['results']
Initialize a List
Initializing a list is important at this stage to hold the question-and-answer pairs later in the saved CSV.
qna = [[“Question”, “Answer”]]
The header row starts with Question and Answer.
Looping Through the Trivia Data
Handling each item in the data is achieved using the for loop as shown:
for item in data:
q = html.unescape(item['question'])
if item['type'] == 'boolean':
q = “True or False? “ + q
a = html.unescape(item[“correct_answer”])
This arrangement helps to unescape the HTML entities in the question and answer using the html.unescape method. For example, < & will be converted to <, & where such occurrence appears.
Also, if the question type is a Boolean, prepend “True or False? “ to the question.
Now, append each question and its correct answer to the list to create a new row using the qna variable:
qna.append([q, a])
Creating the CSV
The final step is to write the question-and-answer pairs to a CSV file named “tech_trivia.csv” with the code:
with open(“tech_trivia.csv”, “w”, newline=””) as file:
csv_writer = csv.writer(file)
csv_writer.writerows(qna)
print(“File created”)
This code block opens the file in write mode with newline set to an empty string. Thereafter, use the writer method of the CSV library to create a CSV writer object and write the rows to the file using the writerows method.
When the file is executed with the command python main.py in the terminal, the message “File created” appears, signifying that the file was created!
Conclusion
Automation has made simple tasks autonomous. For example, using Python code and API, you can generate a file populated with trivia questions and answers.
With this knowledge, you can do a lot more by making boring tasks enjoyable, and everyone benefits without the need for manual data computation.
About the author: Teri Eyenike
Teri Eyenike is a software engineer and a member of the Andela talent network, a private global marketplace for digital talent. With more than five years of experience focused on creating usable web interfaces and other applications using modern technologies, Teri recently built a LinkTree replica app with Django that allows you to create, save and display your user profile with all your favorite links. In addition to software development, Teri is a technical writer with extensive frontend and backend development knowledge, and acts as a community manager on Discord.
