The Negotiator: Learning JSON

Last week I detailed my project goals and outlined the project implementation for my project TheNegotiator. Now I am beginning to follow step one of my project implementation (1. Access the Bureau of Labor Statistics [API](http://www.bls.gov/developers/).).

First you’ll notice the term API (Application Programming Interface). This is a way for developers to automate the process of accessing data displayed on a website.

Once you have requested information from website’s API (for example, I’m interested in salary data for different job titles) the response will be a database with the requested information. Requests can be quite complicated so there are a couple different formatting options for the response (generally XML and JSON). Both ways of formatting have their advantages and disadvantages.

I’ve worked in a limited capacity with XML output from SQL queries, however I found that I needed a bit of help to when it came to parsing JSON databases. I found a great tutorial from Codecademy which taught me how to use APIs and parse JSON with Python. It was fun and especially helpful since Python is my programming/scripting language of choice. Here is an example of the kind of fun you can have with Codecademy:

snapshot_APIcodecademy