How to implement Python client for news search API through RapidAPI

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1

I’m working on building a Python application that needs to fetch news articles using a news search API through RapidAPI. I have the basic request structure but I’m struggling with properly sending the HTTP request and handling the JSON response that comes back.

Here’s what I have so far for the API call:

import requests
import json

def fetch_news_articles(search_term, page_num=1, results_per_page=5):
    api_url = "https://news-search-api.p.rapidapi.com/v1/articles/search"
    
    query_params = {
        "query": search_term,
        "page": page_num,
        "limit": results_per_page,
        "sortBy": "relevance"
    }
    
    request_headers = {
        "X-RapidAPI-Host": "news-search-api.p.rapidapi.com",
        "X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
    }
    
    response = requests.get(api_url, headers=request_headers, params=query_params)
    return response

I need help with properly parsing the JSON response and handling any potential errors. What’s the best way to structure this code and extract the article data from the API response?

2

I’ve used RapidAPI for news articles quite a bit - here’s what works. Always check response.status_code after your requests.get() call. Only parse JSON if you get a 200 status. Then use response.json() to convert the response to a dictionary. The articles usually live in response.json()['articles'] as an array. Wrap your JSON parsing in a try-except block too. This catches decoding errors when the API returns weird formats - happens when you hit rate limits or get empty results.

3

Watch out for rate limiting! RapidAPI throws 429 errors when you hit the limit. Throw in some sleep() between requests if you’re hitting it multiple times. Also, response structures aren’t consistent - some news APIs use ‘results’ instead of ‘articles’. Always print the raw response first so you can see what you’re actually working with.

4

You’ll want to add timeout parameters to your requests call and handle network exceptions properly. Use requests.get(api_url, headers=request_headers, params=query_params, timeout=10) to prevent hanging requests. Always validate that required fields exist before accessing them - API responses can be inconsistent. I usually create a separate function to extract just the fields I need from each article (title, url, published_date, etc). Makes debugging much easier when the API structure changes unexpectedly.