After a year at the bottom of my drawer, I have busted out my Pimoroni Flotilla. It has a Python API and so I figured this was as good a time as any to use Python3 for the first time in many years.
Part of the kit is an LED matrix. I want to use this to display how many people there are in space right now.
There is a great website which will answer this question (howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com) which also has a JSON endpoint. It turns out there are lots of ways of getting this information from Python. Here are three I tried.
requests
Requests calls itself “HTTP for Humans”, and is mostly short and concise, but I need to send some extra headers with the request because of some user-agent filtering on the server.
import requests
url = 'http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/peopleinspace.json'
headers = {'user-agent': 'space-requestor/0.1'}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
print(response.status_code) # 200
print(response.text) # response body as text
inspacenow = response.json() # response body as JSON object
print(inspacenow["people"][0]["name"]) # 'Peggy Whitson'
urllib3
urllib3 describes itself as a ‘powerful, sanity-friendly HTTP client’ and it’s more verbose than I’d like for my simple case, but feels like it might scale into a larger application quite well.
import urllib3
import json
url = 'http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/peopleinspace.json'
http = urllib3.PoolManager()
response = http.request('GET', url)
print(response.status) # 200
print(response.data) # response body as byte string
inspacenow = json.loads(response.data.decode('utf-8')) # response body as JSON object
print(inspacenow["people"][0]["name"]) # Peggy Whitson
unirest
Unirest is a collection of eight HTTP client libraries for multiple programming languages, but supporting near-identical request idioms, which makes it easy to use if you are using multiple languages yourself.
Sadly, the Python library, which I’ve used before very happily, does not work with Python3.
If it worked, the main call would have looked something like response = unirest.get(url), which is a brevity I deeply appreciate!
Conclusion
Requests seems very popular, and seems like a good solid choice for HTTP requests in Python3 applications. It’s what I’ll be using for my humans in space monitor!
