I want to download the JSON data from this sample API call into a file.
I tried using wget, like so:
wget -O ~/ks/json.txt "http://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/search/advanced?pagesize=5&fromdate=1420761600&todate=1420934400&order=desc&sort=activity&accepted=True&answers=1&tagged=hadoop&site=stackoverflow&filter=withbody"
The output I get is not in readable format. The same command works for other web services. Is the Stack Exchange API restricting something or am I doing it wrong?
The API documentation states that the API always returns a compressed response:
...we guarantee that all responses are compressed, either with GZIP or DEFLATE.
GZIP is the default.
This means that you must send the results from wget to gunzip. Like so:
wget -O- <URL> | gunzip > results.json
Or, in your specific example:
wget -O- "http://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/search/advanced?pagesize=1&fromdate=1420761600&todate=1420934400&sort=activity&accepted=True&answers=1&tagged=hadoop&site=stackoverflow&filter=withbody" | gunzip > ~/ks/json.txt