APIs (Application Programming Interface) are Amazingly helpful! We had a great AutoHotkey webinar on using Webservices / APIs. Be sure to check out the 2 hours worth of video as well as the references!
Get our API Syntax writer as it will help write your AutoHotkey scripts will for API web-service calls. 🙂
I use Fiddler to help monitor network traffic. Check out my videos on Fiddler for monitoring Network Traffic. They can really help understand what is being sent from the Apps / Website so you know what you need to replicate.
In most of the below examples I use the below function I wrote to parse the parameters. Please make sure you add it to your scripts or put it in a AutoHotkey library!
Videos discussing API calls
- Fiddler Everywhere tutorial
- Hacking hidden APIs– using Fiddler to review browser traffic
- xmlHTTPRequest verse WinHTTPRequest- Check out this tutorial explaining a great advantage the xmlHTTPRequest has over the WinHTTPRequest
- Weird error in responseText & How to get Response Body
- Discussions around HTTP Protocol, URLDownloadtoFile and Web Scraping
- Automate converting Fiddler traffic to AutoHotkey API calls
How to convert the ResponseBody to text
Example API Calls
- FullContact- Company & Person lookup
- Clearbit- Contact Search
- Data24-7- Return email address for a mobile phone number
- reddit- Return top 20 AHK posts from Reddit; avoid oAuth2 by leveraging browser cookies!
- SmartSheet- Extract JSON as well as binary data (CSV)
- OpenWeatherMap- Grab the current & forecaster weather conditions in XML or JSON
- Yahoo Query- Play with the highly-flexible Yahoo queries!
- Yelp- Work through oAuth1 & oAuth2 to connect to the Yelp API
- Zillow- Extract some great Real estate data from the Zillow API
- Zoom- Vendors often offer APIs to access your data. I demo connecting to Zoom.us here.
- Zoom updated their API. I talk through how I adapted to v2 of zoom
- In this post I demonstrate connecting to v2 of Zoom’s API. (the one above is sun-setting 5/2020)
- Google Maps– I work through four APIs: Directions, Timezone, Places, and GeoLocation
- RingCentral API Calls (Automate Texting, calling, etc.)
Comparison of Web Scraping Verse API calls
