Transforming Curl into Python using Urllib with Sentiment140 API

Question

I am trying to use Python to request data from the Sentiment140 API. The API is using a Bulk Classification Service (JSON). Within terminal it is working fine

curl -d "{'data': [{'text': 'I love Titanic.'}, {'text': 'I hate Titanic.'}]}" http://www.sentiment140.com/api/bulkClassifyJson

leading to the following response:

{"data":[{"text":"I love Titanic.","polarity":4,"meta":{"language":"en"}},{"text":"I hate Titanic.","polarity":0,"meta":{"language":"en"}}]}

I thought I could just use urllib to get the same response from my python code. I tried:

import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.sentiment140.com/api/bulkClassifyJson'
values = {'data': [{'text': 'I love Titanic.'}, {'text': 'I hate Titanic.'}]}

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
response = urllib2.urlopen(url, data)
page = response.read()

The code works but it does not give me any results. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

I think you need to use json here.

Try to do:

data = json.dumps(values) # instead of urllib.urlencode(values)
response = urllib2.urlopen(url, data)
page = response.read()

and on the top

import json