A Complete Beginner’s Introduction to Python
Part 6
Web APIs Explained
APIs or Application Program Interfaces allow different programs to communicate with one another. Web APIs are a subset of APIs that are accessible through the internet.
APIs can be incredibly useful when we’re building applications in order to extend the data or functionality we have access to in our applications. We’re going to be using an API in the project we’ll be working on below to find out if our email addresses have ever been in a data breach.
The specific API we’ll be using is called “Have I Been Pwned” and was created by digital security expert Troy Hunt. This API allows us to provide it an input of our email and then, if our email was in historical data breaches, it returns what breaches our passwords or other information was exposed in.
Let’s take a look at how we can use it!
Using the Have I Been Pwned API!
The first thing we’ll want to do is open up our Python interpreter in the VS Code terminal and import some dependencies:
import requests
import urllib.parse
So we imported both requests and this weird urllib.parse thing. Well, that’s importing a part of the urllib library - parse. Next up, let’s add our actual emails in a variable and modify it slightly using urllib:
YOUR_EMAIL = "replace_with@your_email.com"
encoded_email = urllib.parse.quote_plus(YOUR_EMAIL)
After we save the email as YOUR_EMAIL we then create a new variable called encoded_email. We do this by using a handy method called quote_plus inside of urllib.parse. It will change a Python string of an email like "fernando@gmail.com" to "fernando%40gmail.com". I wont go into the details about this here, but basically the %40 is equivalent to the @ symbol - but %40 isn’t going to break anything if we send it to the API we’re using.
Next up, we create the url that we’ll use to get the information from the API using string concatenation and adding the encoded email to the base URL (that I’ve included for you below):
url = "https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/v2/breachedaccount/" + encoded_email
Next up, let’s use requests to make a request to that URL similar to how we would with a web browser like Chrome or Firefox. We’ll use requests.get(url) to do this, but we’ll save the response in a variable called response. Then we’ll look at the text of the response by running response.text:
response = requests.get(url)
response.text
At this point, if you don’t see anything - Don’t worry! You can troubleshoot this by running print(url) to print out the URL and then try pasting it into a web browser. If you see information, then the email you provided was included in a breach and should also have produced some output when you ran response.text.
If you don’t see any information, you’re one of the lucky few of us who has never had their email compromised in a data breach! You can try this whole process again with the email joe@gmail.com to feel our pain.
The result of response.text is a big string of information in a format called JSON. But if you peek closely at it you can see the name of the breach and other details related to it. Congratulations! You just learned how to use your first API with Python!