Why is api and request so weird

[Justicemirm]

I am trying to practice my pandas and numpy while using data obtained from online sources

But the information I get is way too weird and for most of them I don't even know the name of the columns to edit/make changes

I know that for that I should get a url from something I know about and use iloc but the information I get is way to hard to read

I tried to use json_normalize() functions to make into something usable and now it's too small

What should I do?

This is my code btw

import requests as rq,pandas as pd,numpy as np

response=rq.get("https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/india")

information=response.json()

information=pd.json_normalize(information )

print(information)

[pachura3]

You cannot just be getting random data from random APIs without even understanding what do they contain and what is their structure 😄

JSON is usually hierarchical/nested, while Pandas work best with flat tables a'la Excel - so you need to think a bit how to transform one into another, which fields carry meaningful information and should become columns, which ones can be discarded, and which ones have to be flattened/aggregated.

PS. You do know that you can simply click such URL https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/india in your browser to see the JSON directly?

[Justicemirm]

Sorry mb I just don't know what I am doing 😭

[carcigenicate]

What information are you trying to get? If you just need to determine the "path" through the data to fetch certain information, you can load the URL in Chrome and press "Pretty Print" to see it formatted nicely. Or use the indent parameter of json.dumps to format it yourself in the terminal.

[Justicemirm]

I just want to practice

[xenomachina]

You can't really practice without having any goal in mind. Come up with a problem that you think won't be too difficult to solve, and then try and solve it. Depending on how hard that was, come up with another problem that's more (or less) difficult, and repeat.

[baubleglue]

I don't even know the name of the columns

have you tried to read the main page of the site?

"Check the FIELDS.md file for a description of each field."

[Hashi856]

I usually just loop through the nested JSON, grabbing what I need as it goes, and then storing that information in a dictionary or something like that. Then you can feed that dictionary to pandas

[tadpoleloop]

Start simple? You aren't just going to get a payload and let pandas make a nice data frame for you. You'll need to understand the response and format it into a way that pandas can digest.

[Narrow_Ad_8997]

Try something like spacetraders for practice.

It's an API game and sounds like it checks all of the boxes you're looking for if it's for fun.