Use Mashape with R

Question

I'm trying to use the Mashape platform to access to different APIs with R (e.g. epguides or pipl). I could use directly the original APIs, but getting used to Mashape seems to be a good investment since it provides a unified access to a whole lot of other APIs.

Two concerns however:

1. Mashape doesn't provide any R tutorial. I tried the httr package to query Mashape but no success until there. How to query Mashape with R ? ;
2. As far as I tested, most APIs endpoint on Mashape seem not to respond (even on the testing page provided by the platform). Is Mashape really reliable for every hosted API ?

Answer 1

Great question Gratien,

Here is a code snippet to get you started:

Querying the weather API for the weather forecast over the next week in Los Angeles, California!

Remember to change the X-Mashape-Key with your own :)

#imports an http R library
library(httr)

#perform a GET request on the URL, with two headers and store in a resp variable
resp <- GET("https://george-vustrey-weather.p.mashape.com/api.php?location=Los+Angeles", add_headers("X-Mashape-Key" = "MASHAPE-OWN-KEY","Accept" = "application/json"))

#Prints the headers
headers(resp)

#Prints the content of the response
str(content(resp))

Hope this helps!