We saw how to make REST API calls using the browser. But, what was the purpose of having an API? It was for applications to communicate with each other, right? Let’s now see how to do that programmatically.

Use curl on your command line to make a REST API call to https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=san. This fetches location information for locations matching the query parameter san

Let’s see how to do the same using a Python program

# Import a library that allows to make HTTP request

import requests


# Set the API endpoint

url = "https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=san"


# Use the library to perform an HTTP GET request to the URL

response = requests.get(url)


# Print out the data

print(response.text)

Try the program out and see if you get a similar response to that with curl. You can use this online Python client to run the code.

Java program to do the same

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.InputStreamReader;

import java.net.HttpURLConnection;

import java.net.MalformedURLException;

import java.net.URL;

public class Main {

	public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException, IOException {

		// create url

		URL url = new URL("https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=san");

		// Send Get request and fetch data

		HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

		conn.setRequestMethod("GET");

		BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(

			(conn.getInputStream())));


		// Read data line-by-line from buffer & print it out

		String output;

		while ((output = br.readLine()) != null) {

			System.out.println(output);

		}


		conn.disconnect();

	}

}

You can use this online Java client to try the code and play around making changes. Spring framework provides a RestTemplate class if you don’t want to deal with lower level details like opening a connection & buffers.

Do the below tasks

• Use the above API endpoint to find the value <woeid> attribute for your city (if you get an empty response for your city, try bangalore :) )

(A WOEID (Where On Earth IDentifier) is a unique 32-bit reference identifier that identifies any feature on Earth)

• Use the woeid value you found to call this API endpoint - replace "(woeid)" with your city’s woeid value - https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/(woeid)/

• In the response, the weather_state_name attribute denotes what the weather will be like Light Rain, Clear etc on a particular day denoted by the applicable_date parameter. Find the weather for today.

• Challenge Task - Write a program to print out the weather for today using the above API endpoints