opening a url with urllib in python 3

python python-3.x url urllib
Bradley D. Freeman-Bain picture Bradley D. Freeman-Bain · May 1, 2016 · Viewed 78.4k times · Source

i'm trying to open the URL of this API from the sunlight foundation and return the data from the page in json. this is the code Ive produced, minus the parenthesis around myapikey.

import urllib.request.urlopen
import json

urllib.request.urlopen("https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/legislators?api_key='(myapikey)")

and im getting this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named request.urlopen

what am i doing wrong? ive researched into https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html and still no progress

Answer

styvane picture styvane · May 1, 2016

You need to use from urllib.request import urlopen, also I suggest you use the with statement while opening a connection.

from urllib.request import urlopen

with urlopen("https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/legislators?api_key='(myapikey)") as conn:
    # dosomething

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