DuckDuckGo API not responding when space in encoded url query

Question

I kind of have two real questions. Both relate to this code:

import urllib
import requests

def query(q):
    base_url = "https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q={}&format=json"
    resp = requests.get(base_url.format(urllib.parse.quote(q)))
    json = resp.json()
    return json

One is this: When I query something like this: "US Presidents", I get back something like this:

{'Abstract': '', 'AbstractSource': '', 'AbstractText': '', 'AbstractURL': '', 'Answer': '', 'AnswerType': '', 'Definition': '', 'DefinitionSource': '', 'DefinitionURL': '', 'Entity': '', 'Heading': '', 'Image': '', 'ImageHeight': '', 'ImageIsLogo': '', 'ImageWidth': '', 'Infobox': '', 'Redirect': '', 'RelatedTopics': [], 'Results': [], 'Type': '', 'meta': {'attribution': None, 'blockgroup': None, 'created_date': '2021-03-24', 'description': 'testing', 'designer': None, 'dev_date': '2021-03-24', 'dev_milestone': 'development', 'developer': [{'name': 'zt', 'type': 'duck.co', 'url': 'https://duck.co/user/zt'}], 'example_query': '', 'id': 'just_another_test', 'is_stackexchange': 0, 'js_callback_name': 'another_test', 'live_date': None, 'maintainer': {'github': ''}, 'name': 'Just Another Test', 'perl_module': 'DDG::Lontail::AnotherTest', 'producer': None, 'production_state': 'offline', 'repo': 'fathead', 'signal_from': 'just_another_test', 'src_domain': 'how about there', 'src_id': None, 'src_name': 'hi there', 'src_options': {'directory': '', 'is_fanon': 0, 'is_mediawiki': 0, 'is_wikipedia': 0, 'language': '', 'min_abstract_length': None, 'skip_abstract': 0, 'skip_abstract_paren': 0, 'skip_icon': 0, 'skip_image_name': 0, 'skip_qr': '', 'src_info': '', 'src_skip': ''}, 'src_url': 'Hello there', 'status': None, 'tab': 'is this source', 'topic': [], 'unsafe': None}}

Basically, everything is empty. Even the Heading key, which I know was sent as "US Presidents" encoded into url form. This issue seems to affect all queries I send with a space in them. Even when I go to this url: "https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=US%20Presidents&format=json&pretty=1" in a browser, all I get is a bunch of blank json keys.

My next question is this. When I send in something like this: "1+1", the json response's "Answer" key is this:

{'from': 'calculator', 'id': 'calculator', 'name': 'Calculator', 'result': '', 'signal': 'high', 'templates': {'group': 'base', 'options': {'content': 'DDH.calculator.content'}}}

Everything else seems to be correct, but the 'result' should be '2', should it not? The entire rest of the json seems to be correct, including all 'RelatedTopics'

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Basically duckduckgo api is not a real search engine. It is just a dictionary. So try US%20President instead of US%20presidents and you'll get an answer. For encoding you can use blanks, but if it's not a fixed term I would prefer the plus-sign. You can do this by using urllib.parse.quote_plus()

With calculation you're right. But I see absolutely no use case to use a calculus-api within a python code. It is like using trampoline to travel to the moon if there is a rocket available. And maybe they see it the same and do not offer calc services in their api?!