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Exercise

Using access tokens

As we discussed in the last video, it's common for APIs to require access tokens - unique keys that verify you're authorised to use a service. They're usually pretty easy to use with an API client.

To show how they work, and how easy it can be, we're going to use the R client for the Wordnik dictionary and word use service - 'birdnik' - and an API token we prepared earlier. Birdnik is fairly simple (I wrote it!) and lets you get all sorts of interesting information about word usage in published works. For example, to get the frequency of the use of the word "chocolate", you would write:

word_frequency(api_key, "chocolate")

In this exercise we're going to look at the word "vector" (since it's a common word in R!) using a pre-existing API key (stored as api_key)

Instructions
100 XP
  • Load the package birdnik.
  • Using the pre-existing API key and word_frequency(), get the frequency of the word "vector" in Wordnik's database. Assign the results to vector_frequency.
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