API Calls in R

🤘 Here’s a quick guide on making API calls in R featuring Helium data.

Outline

Install Packages

Require Packages

Make Request

Parse & Explore Data

Adding Parameters to Requests

Adding Headers to Requests

Install Packages

Require Packages

Make Request

Pass a URL into the ‘GET’ function and store the response in a variable called ‘res’.

Response [https://api.helium.io/v1/stats]
  Date: 2022-08-04 01:25
  Status: 200
  Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
  Size: 922 B

Parse & Explore Data

Use the ‘fromJSON’ function from the ‘jsonlite’ package to parse the response data and then print out the names in the resulting data set.

[1] "data"

Go one level deeper into the data set and print out the names again.

[1] "token_supply"     "election_times"   "counts"           "challenge_counts" "block_times"

Alternatively, you can loop through the names as follows:

[1] "token_supply"
[1] "election_times"
[1] "counts"
[1] "challenge_counts"
[1] "block_times"

Get the ‘token_supply’ field from the data.

[1] 124675821

Adding Parameters to Requests

Add ‘min_time’ and ‘max_time’ as parameters on a different endpoint and print the resulting ‘fee’ data.

[1] 10112755000

Adding Headers to Requests

Execute the same query as above except this time specify headers. This will likely be necessary when working with an API which requires an API Key.

[1] 10112755000

API Calls in R was originally published in Trevor French on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.