Master Python skills for gathering and cleaning data from APIs!
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are pre-built functions and rules that determine how two computers or programs communicate with each other. While this is commonly used to transfer data between them, data from the real world is rarely presented in a way that is perfect for analysis. As such, knowing how to properly extract and clean data is an integral skill for all data scientists.
This course will walk you through how to use Python to retrieve and parse data through the powerful tools provided by APIs. You’ll learn techniques for multiple different file types, and explore how you can manipulate your parsed data to suit your specific needs.
No matter your goals, understanding this aspect of data retrieval will give you a better grasp of how data is often transferred and let you navigate the world more informed.
This course assumes familiarity with Python and Jupyter Notebook. You will also need BeautifulSoup installed.
You will learn how to:
- Understand what APIs are
- Make URL requests to retrieve data
- Format and parse JSON data
- Work with XML data using BeautifulSoup
- Write data to a CSV file
- Read data from a local file
…and more!