I'm learning Python and trying to understand this code:
import requests
response = requests.get("https://randomfox.ca/floof")
print(response.status_code)
print(response.text)
I understand that `status_code` tells me whether the request succeeded, and that `response.text` contains the returned data. In this case, the response appears to contain a fox image URL and a link to the webpage.
Why doesn't it also include other parts of the website, such as its logo, visible text, or page layout? Is this because the API endpoint was specifically programmed to return only those fields? Could an endpoint provide much more information if its creator chose to, and could it also return inaccurate or made-up information?
3 Answers
A GET request simply asks a server for a resource. The server decides what to send back, which might be HTML, JSON, an image, plain text, or something else. `response.status_code` is the HTTP status result, while `response.text` is the response body represented as text. The body for this endpoint happens to be JSON containing two URLs, not the complete contents of the website.
An API is not necessarily a copy of the website. It is an interface with specific endpoints, and each endpoint can expose selected information. If the developer wanted to return additional fields, they could program the endpoint to include them, assuming they had the right to provide that data. The response can also contain incorrect information if the server is poorly maintained or intentionally supplies false data—your program generally has no way to verify that the content is true just because it came from an API.
The endpoint returns only the data its developer chose to expose. In this case, `/floof` is an API endpoint designed to return a small JSON response containing a fox image URL and a page link. The main website is different: its URL serves an HTML page intended for people to view, including the logo, text, and layout. Each URL can be programmed to return a different kind of response, so you receive exactly what that endpoint provides.
That makes sense—so the endpoint’s response is intentionally limited to the fields its creator decided to provide.