Data extraction is a crucial aspect of data analysts’ work as it enables us to gather relevant information from various sources. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) helps with data extraction by providing standardized methods for retrieving data from external services, databases, and platforms. In this blog post, I’ll delve into how to use Alteryx API tools to extract data from the website RapidAPI.
- In the text input, add the URL and RapidAPI key.
1.2 Connect the Download and JSON Parse tools to the text input.
1.3 I would like to extract news only from the US with specific search keywords. RapidAPI provides the parameters as follows :
params: {
country: 'us',
qintitle: 'Elon Musk'With the above parameters, go to the Download tool configuration in Alteryx. Under “Payload” section, add in “country” as name and value = “us”. Add in another row for qintile = “Elon Musk”.
1.4 Connect a filter tool to the JSON Parse tool. Condition the filter to only extract records that contain “results”. Next, connect a Column to Split tool. Split the column JSON_Name into three columns. Thereafter, connect a Crosstab tool which groups the records by JSON_Name2. Change the column header (JSON_Name3) and set the values (JSON_String) as new columns. The method of aggregation is concatenate. This is my final workflow.
The API fetches 100 records which contains the News Categories, Contents, Source and URL.
In conclusion, APIs serve as valuable tools for extracting data from external sources, providing data analysts with a standardized and efficient way to access and integrate information into various applications. I hope you enjoy reading this post. Keep a look out for my next blog post on how to extract data with iterations using APIs on Alteryx.