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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I'm trying to access the Atlas Observatory of Economic Complexity API at this location: http://atlas.media.mit.edu/about/api/data/

Using the following code

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib as mpl
from urllib2 import urlopen
import csv as csv
import json


url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
mydata=open(urllib2.urlopen(url))
response = json.loads(mydata)

To which I get the following error

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-38-fbe696d9098d> in <module>()
      8 
      9 url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
---> 10 mydata=open(urlopen(url))
     11 response = json.loads(mydata)
     12 

TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, instance found

I'm new to accessing data from API's via python so there may be something simple I am missing. The goal is to get trade data and put it into a pandas data frame. As a bonus if anyone has any good sources for working with APIs in python please let me know.

share|improve this question

1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted

I recommend using requests, http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/. It can be installed via pip and is a very clean interface built on top of urllib2.

import requests
url = "http://atlas.media.mit.edu/hs/export/2010/show/all/all/"
response = requests.get(url)
mydata = response.text
share|improve this answer
    
Thanks, that answers my question. However, what do I do with the data in mydata at the end...I just get "u'{\n "data": [\n {\n "export_val": 44456016199.05,\n" and so on. How do I get that into a tabular format such as a data frame? –  tomc4yt Sep 30 '14 at 17:07
1  
can import json and call json.loads() on the json string to yield a dictionary, then use pandas.DataFrame.from_dict() to put it into pandas. –  ragingSloth Sep 30 '14 at 19:20

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