Working with Tenor's API

Question

My problem is that I don't know how to work with the result of the search of a gif. I used an example, I know how to modify some parameters but I don't know how to build the gifs of the result. Code:

import requests
import json

# set the apikey and limit
apikey = "MYKEY"  # test value
lmt = 8

# load the user's anonymous ID from cookies or some other disk storage
# anon_id = <from db/cookies>

# ELSE - first time user, grab and store their the anonymous ID
r = requests.get("https://api.tenor.com/v1/anonid?key=%s" % apikey)

if r.status_code == 200:
    anon_id = json.loads(r.content)["anon_id"]
    # store in db/cookies for re-use later
else:
    anon_id = ""

# our test search
search_term = "love"

# get the top 8 GIFs for the search term
r = requests.get(
    "https://api.tenor.com/v1/search?q=%s&key=%s&limit=%s&anon_id=%s" %   
     (search_term, apikey, lmt, anon_id))

if r.status_code == 200:
    # load the GIFs using the urls for the smaller GIF sizes
    top_8gifs = json.loads(r.content)
    print (top_8gifs)
else:
    top_8gifs = None

I would like to download the file. I know I can do it with urllib and request, but the problem is that I don't even know what is top_8gifs.

I hope someone could help me. I'm waiting you answer, thanks for your attention!!

Answer 1

First of all you have to use a legitimate key instead of MYKEY. Once you have done that you'll observe this code will print the output of the GET request that you have sent. It is a json file which is similar to a dictionary in python. So now you can exploit this dictionary and obtain the urls. The best strategy is to simply print out the output of json and observe the structure of dictionary carefully and extract the url from it. If you want more clarity we can use pprint module in python. It is pretty awesome and will show you how a json file looks properly. Here is the modified version of your code which pretty prints the json file, prints the gif urls and downloads the gif files. You can improve upon it and play with it if you want.

import requests
import json
import urllib.request,urllib.parse,urllib.error
import pprint

# set the apikey and limit
apikey = "YOURKEY"  # test value
lmt = 8

# load the user's anonymous ID from cookies or some other disk storage
# anon_id = <from db/cookies>

# ELSE - first time user, grab and store their the anonymous ID
r = requests.get("https://api.tenor.com/v1/anonid?key=%s" % apikey)

if r.status_code == 200:
    anon_id = json.loads(r.content)["anon_id"]
    # store in db/cookies for re-use later
else:
    anon_id = ""

# our test search
search_term = "love"

# get the top 8 GIFs for the search term
r = requests.get(
    "https://api.tenor.com/v1/search?q=%s&key=%s&limit=%s&anon_id=%s" %   
     (search_term, apikey, lmt, anon_id))

if r.status_code == 200:
    # load the GIFs using the urls for the smaller GIF sizes
    pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4)
    top_8gifs = json.loads(r.content)
    pp.pprint(top_8gifs) #pretty prints the json file.
    for i in range(len(top_8gifs['results'])):
        url = top_8gifs['results'][i]['media'][0]['gif']['url'] #This is the url from json.
        print (url)
        urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, str(i)+'.gif') #Downloads the gif file.
else:
    top_8gifs = None