Self-Test: API

Self-Test: API#

Note

This self-test helps you check your understanding of the chapter API: Working with DraCor Programmatically.

  • There is no grading and nothing is stored.

  • Read the feedback for each option carefully, including when you answered correctly.

  • The exercises at the end contain code that you can run and change. Launch this page as a notebook from the rocket icon at the top (see Appendix A), or copy the code into your own Python environment.

Estimated time: 20–30 minutes.

Question 1#

Question 2#

Question 3#

Question 4#

Question 5#

Question 6#

Question 7#

Exercise 1: From front-end URL to metadata#

The following code turns a front-end URL into an API URL and prints some metadata of the play. Run it. Then find another play in the German Shakespeare Drama Corpus in the front-end, paste its URL and run the cell again.

import requests

frontend_url = "https://dracor.org/gersh/was-ihr-wollt"

corpusname, playname = frontend_url.replace("https://dracor.org/", "").split("/")
api_url = f"https://dracor.org/api/v1/corpora/{corpusname}/plays/{playname}"

response = requests.get(api_url, timeout=60)
if response.status_code == 200:
    play = response.json()
    print(play["title"], play["yearNormalized"], len(play["characters"]), "characters")
else:
    print(f"Request failed with status code: {response.status_code}")

Was ihr wollt 1797 18 characters

Now change one letter in the play name and run the cell again. Which status code do you get, and why?

Exercise 2: Corpus metadata as a table#

The following code loads the metadata of all plays in the German Shakespeare Drama Corpus as a table. Run it, then answer with one or two lines of code: Which play has the most words (wordCountText)?

import io
import pandas as pd
import requests

url = "https://dracor.org/api/v1/corpora/gersh/metadata"
response = requests.get(url, headers={"Accept": "text/csv"}, timeout=60)
metadata_df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(response.text))

print(len(metadata_df), "plays")
metadata_df[["title", "yearNormalized", "numOfSpeakers", "wordCountText"]].head()

38 plays
title yearNormalized numOfSpeakers wordCountText
0 Antonius und Cleopatra 1831 75 24933
1 Coriolanus 1831 98 27822
2 Cymbeline 1832 41 27465
3 Das Wintermärchen 1832 38 25481
4 Der Kaufmann von Venedig 1799 26 21214
Solution
metadata_df.sort_values(by="wordCountText", ascending=False)[["title", "wordCountText"]].head(1)

Exercise 3: The same play with PyDraCor#

Get the play from Exercise 1 with PyDraCor and print the number of its characters. Do you get the same number as with requests?

from pydracor import DraCorAPI

dracor = DraCorAPI()
play = dracor.get_play("gersh", "was-ihr-wollt")
print(play.title)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ModuleNotFoundError                       Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[10], line 1
----> 1 from pydracor import DraCorAPI
      2 
      3 dracor = DraCorAPI()
      4 play = dracor.get_play("gersh", "was-ihr-wollt")

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pydracor'
Solution
print(len(play.characters), "characters")

Both numbers are the same: PyDraCor calls the same API endpoint as the requests code in Exercise 1.

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