Goodreads API Get Reviews

Question

I am looking to retrieve the reviews of a certain book from Goodreads API. I am relatively new in APIs.

Here is a link to the API documentation: https://www.goodreads.com/api#book.show

I have created this basic code, and it prints out Success, but no result. Data: Object Document. Here is my code:

$.get("https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn?format=xml&key=d9xonLKxHDCI5HF1mHjbQ&isbn=9781843589501", function(data, status){
    alert("Data: " + data + "\nStatus: " + status);
});

What am I missing to be able to display the results? ap

Answer 1

The result being returned is in XMLFormat. You need to have something at your client side to read the XML retireved. Have a look at the below example https://api.jquery.com/jQuery.parseXML/

Answer 2

I used an external library called: xml2js

Here is a code snippet as to make the returned value as you would an object.

var parseString = require("xml2js").parseString;


request(options)
.then(function(data) {
  var xml = data;

  parseString(xml, { trim: true }, (err, result) => {
    if (err) //do something
    else //something else

So here, you get the data, turn it into JSON and you can act how you want with it accordingly. Though, realise that you have a callback here!