About

A lightweight Python wrapper for the Stack Exchange API v2.1. Built with Requests.

Why yet another SE API Python wrapper? (I'm aware of Stack.PY - A Python Module for Accessing the Stack Exchange 2.1 API and Py-StackExchange: An API wrapper for Python)

For me there were two key things:

• make commands as straightforward as possible,
• make easy to harvest a lot of pages.

First, because I wanted to use commands directly from the documentation, e.g.:

se = SEAPI.SEAPI()
se.fetch("users/{ids}/comments/{toid}", ids=[29407, 23354], toid=22656,
          sort="creation", order="desc", site="stackoverflow") 

Second arose from practical reason - I wanted to plot Map of all SE sites (except the 3 biggest), see also Tag Graph Map of Stack Exchange wiki at GitHub, using e.g.:

se.fetch("users", site="cogsci")

to easily get user_id, account_id and reputation.

License

An open license CC BY 3.0. No warranty etc.

Download

From GitHub: https://github.com/stared/se-api-py.

Do you want to raise an issue or contribute? Great!

Contact

[email protected]

General philosophy of usage

• se.fetch[_one](command, **parameters)
• parameters as in the documentation
• in the command, "{something}" and "{somethings}" are treated as placeholders for an int/str or a list of int/str, respectively

Examples

import SEAPI
se = SEAPI.SEAPI()

some_users = se.fetch_one("users/{ids}", ids=[1,3,7,9,13], site="stackoverflow") 

all_user = se.fetch("users", site="academia")

Now, some_users and all_user are lists with the respective response from each query.

Alternatively, you can initialize SEAPI with default options, typically - site name, e.g.

so = SEAPI.SEAPI(site="stackoverflow")

some_questions = so.fetch("questions", page_limit=10)
# except for very small sites, you want to set page limit

some_sorted_posts = so.fetch_one("posts", order="desc", sort="votes")
# for sorting sometimes asking for more that one results in "throttle violation"

If you want to diagnose a problem, or avoid it:

so.last_call
# lookup at the last command sent

so.last_status
# check the last response status

slow_food = so.fetch("tags", min_delay=0.5)
# or set delay (by default it's 0.05)

Feedback

I'm a beginner, so all remarks with respect to the code quality, good practices, etc are welcome!