Python

I use Python locally within Visual Studio Code to call a public API. The goal of this exercise is not only to make a successful HTTP request, but also to understand the individual parts of a small Python script that interacts with a real internet service.

A good beginner API for this type of project is the GitHub REST API. This API is useful because it allows new developers to practice with real-world data while learning concepts that commonly appear in professional software development. These concepts include HTTP status codes, JSON responses, environment variables, API tokens, error handling, and storing project dependencies in a local virtual environment.

In this writeup, I will cover how a custom script in python “knows” to read text input by the user written at the command line. In line 1, the sys module is first imported. This makes all functions defined within the sys module available to the namespace of the rest of our program.

The dot operator accesses the “argv” property contained within the sys module, and this value is stored in the “message” variable. Then, when we print this variable, python returns a list object with 3 indexes. The string ‘argv.py’ is contained at the [0] index, ‘hello’ at the [1] index, and ‘everyone!’ at the [2] index.