I'm trying to access the Atlas Observatory of Economic Complexity API at this location: http://atlas.media.mit.edu/about/api/data/
Using the following code
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib as mpl
from urllib2 import urlopen
import csv as csv
import json
url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
mydata=open(urllib2.urlopen(url))
response = json.loads(mydata)
To which I get the following error
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-38-fbe696d9098d> in <module>()
8
9 url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
---> 10 mydata=open(urlopen(url))
11 response = json.loads(mydata)
12
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, instance found
I'm new to accessing data from API's via python so there may be something simple I am missing. The goal is to get trade data and put it into a pandas data frame. As a bonus if anyone has any good sources for working with APIs in python please let me know.
I recommend using requests, http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/. It can be installed via pip and is a very clean interface built on top of urllib2.
import requests
url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
response = requests.get(url)
mydata = response.text