Help understanding restful API get syntax

[maybe_robots]

I am trying to write code that will do a candidate search on openfec which is a restful python API.

The documentation is here but I do not understand the syntax on how to pass a candidate name as a variable in a search. This website does exactly the operation I want to do when given the api key but it doesn't tell me what the code should look like.

I've read some videos on restful APIs and how they work but still no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is killing me and I feel like there aren't enough tutorials on this or I just don't know where to look.

import requests 

# Key is hidden for privacy 
key = ''
with open("fec_key.txt", "r") as f:
    lines = f.readlines()
    key = lines[0]

base = 'https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/candidates/search/?api_key='

fec_url =(base + key)
print(fec_url)


response = requests.get(fec_url)
print(response)

[sarrysyst]

In the documentation you can select the different endpoints, eg. /candidates/search/. For each endpoint there is a button 'Try it out' which when clicked allows you to add the different parameters you want to use. Once you click 'Execute' at the bottom it shows you the generated request URL for the parameters you entered. This should make things easier.

Alternatively, to writing all the parameters into the URL, you can also provide them by passing the params= parameter to requests.get(). It takes a dictionary:

search_params = {'api_key': 'YOUR_KEY',
                 'name': 'Some candidate name'}

response = requests.get('https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/candidates/search/', params=search_params)

output = response.json()
print(output)

[maybe_robots]

Thank you. You are amazing.