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Welcome to Week 6 of LS Python!

This week we will be covering the following topics:

  • Python API
  • Introduction to Web Scraping and Parsing
    • Introduction to Selenium

Python APIs

Every website has an API or Application Programming Interface hosted on its web server, through which it distributes data avaliable on the web server. To use an API, you make a request to a remote web server, and retrieve the data you need. Retrieving data using APIs can be useful when the data on the web server is dynamic, that is, changing constantly, for example, stock price data. A good analogy for understanding APIs is that when you type in a URL, you request a webpage from the webserver, similarly, through an API you request data from the webserver. This data is returned in JSON format.

Introduction to Web Scraping and Parsing

Web scraping is the process of accessing the HTML page of any website and then collecting data from that page. This is useful for many applications where you want data continously from websites in which data is dynamic, for instance, stock prices, or sports stats, or amazon product prices. Again, the idea is same as APIs, that is collect data from websites, but here instead of using the website's API for data, we use the HTML page of the website.

Now lets go deeper into web scraping and build our own parser. For navigating through a webpage to extract only the useful information, we use a famous Python Library known as BeautifulSoup. You can checkout the documentation here.

Getting Started with Selenium

Selenium is a framework which allows us to interact with the HTML elements of a website. So till now, we were only extracting data from a HTML webpage and then using it for different tasks. In addition to extracting data, Selenium allows us to interact with the webpage as well. So any interaction that you perform with a webpage can be automated using Selenium, for eg: Filling a form online, reading and extracting elements of the source code, etc. Now we will only be covering the basic of Selenium here, since Selenium in itself requires another course for learning.

The videos in the playlist are made for absolute beginners, and walks through each and every step in detail, covering everything from installation (and troubleshooting) to introducing UnitTest frameworks.

  • Optionally, you can also checkout this link for reading tutorials - Selenium WebDriver Tutorials. Keep in mind that this link also covers advanced tutorials on selenium webdrivers, so if you want to explore more of Selenium, you can go through them.

Assignment 6 - Automate Spotify with Python

For this week's assignment, you have 2 options to choose from and you have to submit atleast one of them.

Intermediate Assignment

Here you will be implementing a Desktop Notifier for Covid19 which displays latest update of coronavirus in India. You will be requesting data from this website, use beautifulsoup to parse the data and then display a desktop notification. To get a detailed guide on the project checkout this reference

Advanced Assignment

Here you will be implementing a project in Python which takes a YouTube music video link, searches for the song title in Spotify and adds it to a playlist.

What you need for the assignment -

  • YouTube Data API - This will be used for getting all the videos and playlists on YouTube.
  • YouTube-dl Library - This will be used for getting the artist and the song name from a youtube video.
  • Spotify Web API - This will be used for searching a song name on Spotify and then adding it to Liked Songs.

To familiarize yourself with the Youtube API, go to this Python Youtube API tutorial
To familiarize yourself with the Spotufy API, go to this Python Spotify API tutorial
To see detailed step by step instructions of the project, checkout this reference

Assignment Submission

For this week's submission, you need to make a short video of 1-2 minutes showing your working code, upload it to Google Drive and then submit the drive link. Make sure to show every step of your code from beginning to end. For eg, for the advanced assignment, the final video should show everything from the user selecting a playlist/song from YouTube to the song showing up in Spotify's Liked songs.