R1D3 Learning More Python Lists and Exploring the Wordpress API

January 31, 2018 | programming | python |

For Day 3 I continued to work more on my old_posts python script. My favorite part of 100 Days of Code is that I am taking the time to actually think through some of these problems, read documentation, and try to learn something.

Python Lists

Learned a ton about python lists thanks to this wonderful google developer guide. Specifically (after writing python for about 5 years) I learned about list.extend() for the very first time. Came in handy in this particular use case because I was doing some very inefficient for loops to append to a list when it was more efficient to extend since it requires less operations.

The key differnce is that append will add a single to the end of a list, where extend will inject a list to the end of a list merging the two lists. This is particularly handy when you want to grab JSON from several requests and merge them together into a single JSON object for further processing which is what I am doing in this script.

Using Requests HEAD

I also explored more of the requests library and made an optimization that looks really silly in hindsight.

In the script I was making a single request in order to grab the headers to see the total number of pages. Instea of using request.head which has a tiny payload of headers, I was using request.get which gets the headers along with the entire JSON payload. This was immediately thrown away since I did not use the response in later parts of the function.

Exploring the Wordpress API Filters

I also explored more of the WordPress API and started to use some API level filters to reduce the payload that I was receiving in an effort to reduce the overall time that the script takes to run. Specifically I am now using context=embed which removes the text body (since I only need the title and the link), and before=(today - 1 year + 1 day) since I only care about posts that were written more than a year ago today.

JSON is Not SQL

I’ve been thinking about my very first forray into any sort of programming years ago. I primarily worked with Microsoft SQL Server and learned how to write efficient queries. I was thinking of how easy this problem would have been to solve if I had direct access to the database. The lesson here, that it is still taking me a while to fully wrap my head around, is that JSON is not a SQL database. You have to think about it differently. If an API offers the ability to do some filtering you should take advantage of it when you can.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on mastodon or via email.

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Lev Lazinskiy