Defining API

A widely used term, API (Application Programming Interface) is defined as a set of instructions and standards to access a web based software application. But what does it mean in real life? Firstly, APIs allow users to send a request for a particular resource, such as Facebook or Twitter , and receive some data in response. It is worth noting that all API providers fix some limitations on the quantity or type of data which users can obtain. APIs give access data processing resources, such as AlchemyAPI that receives in a request verbatim (textual data) and sends in response all results of the analysis, such as nouns, verbs, entities, and so on. In our case, the APIs are used either to get data from social networks or to execute some complex processing on them.

In order to access and manipulate APIs, we have to install the urllib2 library:

pip3 install urllib2

In some cases, if you fail to perform the installation. You can also try using the request library, which is compatible with Python 2.x and 3.x.

pip3 install request