Exploring Python’s urllib Library with an In-Depth Example

Learn how to fetch and process JSON data using urllib and JSONPlaceholder API

Introduction:

Python’s urllib library is a powerful tool for working with URLs, making HTTP requests, and interacting with websites or APIs. In this tutorial, we'll explore an in-depth example of how to use urllib.request to fetch and process data from the JSONPlaceholder API, a free REST API that provides placeholder data for testing and prototyping.

Step 1: Setting up the Python script

Start by importing the necessary Python modules: urllib.request, json, and collections.defaultdict.

import urllib.request
import json
from collections import defaultdict

Step 2: Define the function to fetch data from the API

Create a function called fetch_data that takes a URL as input, makes an HTTP GET request, and returns the parsed JSON data.

def fetch_data(url):
    with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
        data = json.loads(response.read().decode())
    return data

Step 3: Fetch users and posts data

Fetch users and posts data from the JSONPlaceholder API using the fetch_data function.

users_url = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users'
users = fetch_data(users_url)

posts_url =…