Book Image

Python Programming Blueprints

By : Daniel Furtado, Marcus Pennington
Book Image

Python Programming Blueprints

By: Daniel Furtado, Marcus Pennington

Overview of this book

Python is a very powerful, high-level, object-oriented programming language. It's known for its simplicity and huge community support. Python Programming Blueprints will help you build useful, real-world applications using Python. In this book, we will cover some of the most common tasks that Python developers face on a daily basis, including performance optimization and making web applications more secure. We will familiarize ourselves with the associated software stack and master asynchronous features in Python. We will build a weather application using command-line parsing. We will then move on to create a Spotify remote control where we'll use OAuth and the Spotify Web API. The next project will cover reactive extensions by teaching you how to cast votes on Twitter the Python way. We will also focus on web development by using the famous Django framework to create an online game store. We will then create a web-based messenger using the new Nameko microservice framework. We will cover topics like authenticating users and, storing messages in Redis. By the end of the book, you will have gained hands-on experience in coding with Python.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Creating the API wrapper


In this section, we are going to create a set of functions that will wrap the fixer.io API and will help us use it in a simple way within our project.

Let's go ahead and create a new file called request.py in the currency_converter/currency_converter/core directory. First, we are going to include some import statements:

import requests
from http import HTTPStatus
import json

We obviously need requests so that we can perform requests to the fixer.io endpoints, and we are also importing HTTPStatus from the HTTP module so we can return the correct HTTP status code; also be a bit more verbose in our code. It's much nicer and easier to read the HTTPStatus.OK return than only 200.

Lastly, we import the json package so that we can parse the JSON content that we get from fixer.io into Python objects.

Next, we are going to add our first function. This function will return the current exchange rates given a specific currency:

def fetch_exchange_rates_by_currency(currency):
    response...