fastopendata_client 0.0.33

Client for the FastOpenData API service

FastOpenData Client

The Python client for FastOpenData.

To use this client to retrieve data, you must have an API key. You can use the client itself to get a free API key that's suitable for evaluation purposes:

>>> from fastopendata_client import FastOpenData
>>> api_key = FastOpenData.get_api_key('YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS')

Save your API key somewhere; you will use it each time you invoke the FastOpenData client. If you lose your key, you can call this method again with the same email address.

The free API key is rate limited and not suitable for production purposes. To subscribe to the FastOpenData service and receive a key that will provide unlimited access, please visit https://fastopendata.com. If you have questions about the service or your particular use-case, email [e-mail].

The main class for this client is FastOpenData which is invoked like so:

>>> from fastopendata_client import FastOpenData
>>> session = FastOpenData(api_key="<YOUR_API_KEY>")
>>> data = session.request(free_form_query="123 Main Street, Tallahassee, FL, 12345")

data now contains a dictionary with all the data from the FastOpenData server.

If you have a Pandas dataframe, you can append new columns containing data from FastOpenData by calling FastOpenData.append_to_dataframe and specifying which columns contain address information. For example, if COLUMN_NAME contains unstructured address strings, you can do this:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> from fastopendata_client import FastOpenData
>>> session = FastOpenData(api_key="<YOUR_API_KEY>")
>>> df = pd.DataFrame(...)
>>> session.append_to_dataframe(df, free_form_query=COLUMN_NAME)

Now df contains many new columns containing data from the FastOpenData server.

If your dataframe has columns containing structured address information, you can do:

>>> session.append_to_dataframe(
        df,
        address1=ADDRESS1_COLUMN,
        address2=ADDRESS2_COLUMN,
        city=CITY_COLUMN,
        state=STATE_COLUMN,
        zip_code=ZIP_CODE_COLUMN
    )

Note that you have the option of specifying either free_form_query or the column names for structured address data, but not both. Doing so will raise an exception.