获取 python 中的好友列表

Question

I have got a task to fetch a list of friends of some test user from site livejournal but have never done smth like this. How do we work with API and that stuff in Python?

livejournal.com/bots

Answer 1

Generally avoid using webscraping methods, where you take data directly from the HTML code of the website, as websites tend to be dynamic. Use webscraping as a last resort!

So always search first if the website provides an API. As I can see livejournal does provide a kind of an API but maybe itdoes not provide you with the information you are looking for.

Nevertheless, working with an API is straightforward. First you must find the endpoint which you want to reach, that is many times a link like: https://exampleusername.livejournal.com/data/rss which as you can see from the link you wrote returns: A user's recent entries syndicated using the Real Simple Syndication XML format.

After you find your endpoint in Python you can use the requests module which in my experience is really good. With this module you can send a request to the service endpoint to return the data that you queried. You can do that with the.get() method:

response = requests.get(API_ENDPOINT_URL)

Then you need to check if the service didn't respond with the data if the response code of the reply message was not 200:

# throw exception if response code is different than 200
if response.status_code != 200:
    print("There was an error in the response. You didn't get the data you wanted back")

If everything went alright though and the response code was 200 then you (most likely) have the data you wanted. Now you only need to handle them as you wish.

Note that requests does not provide support for XML data but you can use the built-in XML parsers in python as it explained in this post . So after you get the data you can use something like this to handle the XML data:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
tree = ElementTree.fromstring(response.content)

So a complete approach would look like this:

import requests
from xml.etree import ElementTree

# note here that 'ohnotheydidnt' is the name of the user of whom you wanna get the data
API_ENDPOINT_URL = "https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/data/rss"

# send the request and await for a response
response = requests.get(API_ENDPOINT_URL)
# throw exception if response code is different than 200
if response.status_code != 200:
    print("There was an error in the response. You didn't get the data you wanted back")

# get the XML data from the response
tree = ElementTree.fromstring(response.content)

# parse the tree and handle the data