I’m pretty new to working with APIs in R and could use some guidance on the basic setup. I want to fetch airline pricing information from a RapidAPI service into my R environment. I already have a RapidAPI account set up. What would be the starting code structure to establish this connection? I’m looking for the fundamental approach to authenticate and make requests to their API endpoints. Any basic example or workflow would really help me get started with this integration.
To access RapidAPI endpoints using R, you’ll want to use the httr package. First, ensure it’s installed and then retrieve your API key from the RapidAPI dashboard. It’s essential to include headers like X-RapidAPI-Key and X-RapidAPI-Host in your requests. I find it helpful to set a base URL to keep things streamlined. Don’t forget to properly parse the response with the content() function to handle the JSON data correctly. Keep in mind the rate limits for some endpoints and consider implementing error handling with tryCatch() when testing your integration. The API documentation often specifies the exact header requirements, which might vary.
honestly the httr2 package is probably better than regular httr these days if ur starting fresh. the syntax is cleaner and handles authentication smoother imo. just do req_url() then req_headers() for your rapidapi key stuff and req_perform() to actually send it. way less messy than the old httr workflow
Building on the httr approach, I’ve found that starting with a simple GET request structure works well for most RapidAPI services. After installing httr, create your request using GET() with the endpoint URL and include your authentication headers in the add_headers() function. For airline pricing APIs specifically, you’ll likely need to pass query parameters for routes and dates - use the query parameter in your GET call for this. One thing that caught me early on was forgetting to check the response status with status_code() before trying to parse the data. Also worth noting that some RapidAPI endpoints return data in different formats, so using jsonlite::fromJSON() on the content might be necessary depending on what you’re working with. The RapidAPI console usually shows you exactly what headers and parameters each endpoint expects, which saves a lot of trial and error.