Contact an API using requests!

api.py

    # Here we import the 'requests' library. This allows us to visit URLs
    # straight from Python. Note that this must be installed using pip,
    # as described in the previous post
    import requests

    # We define a variable which represents the URL we want to get data from
    api_url = 'http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/company/trackmaven.js'

    # Next we make a dictionary of parameters that are needed to contact the
    # API - in this case, all we need is the key that tells the API we are
    # a registered user. Replace <my_api_key> with our key.
    parameters = {
        'api_key': '<my_api_key>'
    }

    # This is the big one - using requests, we get data from the API by
    # visiting 'api_url' and sending it the required parameters. Once
    # the request is made, the 'response' object will hold all of the data
    # we get back from
    response = requests.get(api_url, params=parameters)

    # We print out a dictionary of the JSON data that we got back from the
    # API.
    print response.json()