How to obtain a JSON response from the stats.nba.com API?

Question

I'm just trying to simply use a Python get request to access JSON data from stats.nba.com. It seems pretty straight-forward as I can enter the URL into your browser and get the results I'm looking for. However, whenever I run this the program just runs to no end. I'm wondering if I have to include some type of headers information in my get request.

The code is below:

import requests

url = 'http://stats.nba.com/stats/commonteamroster?LeagueID=00&Season=2017-18&TeamID=1610612756'
response=requests.get(url)
print response.text

Answer 1

I have tried to visit the url you given, you can add header to your request to avoid this problem (the minimum information you need to provide is User-Agent, I think you can use more header information as you can):

headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36'}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

The stats.nba.com website need your 'User-Agent' header information.

You can get your request header information from Network tab in the browser.

Take chrome as example, when you press F12 , and visit url you given, you can find the relative request information, the most useful information is request headers.

Answer 2

You need to use headers. Try copying from your browser's network tab. Here's what worked for me:

request_headers = {
    'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8',
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
    'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
    'Connection': 'keep-alive',
    'Host': 'stats.nba.com',
    'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests': '1',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36'
}

And here's the modified get :

response = requests.get(url, headers = request_headers)