#Retrieve user info yelp api how to
#Retrieve user info yelp api full
#Retrieve user info yelp api software

#Retrieve user info yelp api how to

An example: How to use Yelp API for my ruby program? Then you might get some JSONs, which you will have to parse before finding and using data.ģ.

#Retrieve user info yelp api software

There are a lot when I look it up online: httparty, faraday, http, etc, tools which you will pass parameters and the link that you get from the base software to and get a response from. Make sure you read the document about how to use the key and value pair you have. There are client_id and API_key pair or client_id and client_secret pair. My understanding: some concepts you need to know before using APIĪs I know, some APIs you can use without any kind of authentication, but most of them do require one because as I mention above, API providers want to track a lot of information from whoever is using their API, therefore, a key/value pair are required to identify clients so as to track them. As for what are API keys or Client IDs, I am going to illustrate now.Ģ. I believe those are of great business value. By the specific API keys or Client IDs, a program that gives out those is more possible to track data like who is using this API and what are clients using those for stuff like that. Also, I feel like compared to scraping, a website or a software should be happier to offer API instead of letting people secretly doing things on data and maybe cause unknown problems or dangers to the program itself. What’s more, compared to scraping, which requires you to go through all the HTML documents and find the nodes and tags and everything, API is easier as you can usually get the result back by using the link it gives you and passing some specific parameters in query strings. The format it has is usually very simple and easy to utilize. In the API case, since it is software to software, compelling presentation is not necessary, so it will return with only the “meat”, the information we want. Usually, when we, as human being users, surf the Internet using web browser, we send a request and get some vivid images or attractive layout more than just plain text information we want. After I have been doing some research, I got this impression that API is a way for a software to communicate with another, or to many other softwares. But I didn’t really know what that means at first. Literally, API means Application Programming Interface. Please e-mail me when you find something wrong, thanks! Therefore, they might not be super accurate. The rest of the article talks about just my basic understanding of API after I have done some research. So here, I am not trying to make a tutorial talk about API, but actually just trying to write down what I know or understand about API, like making notes for the future me. While to a lot of great developers out there, API may be very easy things, but to me, it took me a long time to finally get to understand a bit of its concept and usage.

“Why don’t you use API?” However, after I talked to my tutor Beth, she asked me that and I decided to challenge myself and use API even I never heard of it before she mentioned that. Without too much thinking, I decide to use Yelp to look for information since it has a lot of users around America and even the whole world and therefore, should provide more opinions with great variety.Īt first, I got information from Yelp by scraping from the website.

Actually, what I am trying to do through the program is to get information to help myself and my other parent friends to find the best daycare center in the neighborhood. I never heard of API until recently when I work on my CLI program. It includes my understanding of API, some important concepts you have to know before you use API, and how to hide your API key. In this article, I am going to talk about how I use Yelp API in my CLI project.

#Retrieve user info yelp api full

Feel free to click daycare-CLI-project to check out the full repo.