How to get tags using the API?

Question

I have a requirement in my application to show the technical skills (tags) in auto-complete format like Stack Overflow has.

Is there any example to get the tags from Stack Overflow using JavaScript + JSON?

Answer 1

Based on the information you've provided in your comment - I will now provide an example of how you might accomplish what you're looking to do.

The tags can be retrieved from the API using the /tags route - a sample request for Stack Overflow looks something like this (notice the results are paginated - you will receive the first 30 tags according to the default sorting method):

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/tags

Now for auto-completion, you will need to make use of one of the parameters to the /tags route: filter. The filter is a query string parameter that causes the /tags route to return only the tags that contain the provided string. For example, to get all tags that contain the string 'vb', you would issue the following request:

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/tags?filter=vb

Notice that there are far fewer tags returned. Also notice that every single one of them contains the string 'vb' somewhere in the name. In order to create a tag autocompletion text box like the one on the sites themselves, you will need one more piece of information: the description for the tag.

Fortunately, this is easy to - it's provided in the Tag Wiki route. Here is an example that fetches the tag wiki for Perl:

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/tags/perl/wikis

In the response, you will find an entry 'wiki_excerpt' - this can be used for the tag description. To get the wiki for multiple tags, just separate them with a semicolon:

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/tags/perl;python/wikis

Now you have all of the pieces needed to re-implement the tag autocomplete you see on the Stack Exchange sites. When the user enters tags:

1. Load all tags for the site filtered by the string the user has entered.
2. Combine the returned list of tags with a semicolon and hit the /tags/.../wikis route.
3. Now present the tags and descriptions to the user.