The Basic API Request

In this exercise, you will construct an API request to retrieve the average family size and median age for all states in the United States. The data will come from Summary File 1 of the 2010 Decennial Census.

requests has been imported for you.

This exercise is part of the course

Analyzing US Census Data in Python

View Course

Exercise instructions

Specify appropriate string values for year and dataset to retrieve data for 2010 from Summary File 1 of the Decennial Census
Construct get_vars, the list of Census variables to request, with the following variable names: "NAME", "P013001" (median age), "P037001" (average family size)
Output r.text using the print function

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Build base URL
HOST = "https://api.census.gov/data"
year = ____
dataset = ____
base_url = "/".join([HOST, year, dataset])

# Specify Census variables and other predicates
get_vars = ____
predicates = {}
predicates["get"] = ",".join(get_vars)
predicates["for"] = "state:*"

# Execute the request, examine text of response object
r = requests.get(base_url, params=predicates)
print(____)

Edit and Run Code