Argthtjtr

I wrote a script to fetch the location for the ISS using two simple API's. This is my first time writing a python script. Any advice or modifications would be highly appreciated. How is the code review and where are the areas I can Improve upon?

GITHUB LINK: https://github.com/dsaharia/iss_location

import urllib.request # to make requests to the api

import json # to parse the json response

import reverse_geocoder as rg # to get address from location



url = "http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json"

response = urllib.request.urlopen(url) # request the api, returns a JSON object

json_result = json.loads(response.read()) # read the JSON object



# Separate different values based on keys.

people = json_result['people'] # people currently in space

number_in_space = json_result['number'] # total people in space

print("People in space : ", number_in_space)

print("----NAMES----")



for p in people:

    print(p['name'])



# ISS data

iss_url = "http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json"

iss_response = urllib.request.urlopen(iss_url)

iss_json_result = json.loads(iss_response.read())

# Store the positions

latitude = iss_json_result['iss_position']['latitude'] # store the latitude

longitude = iss_json_result['iss_position']['longitude']

print("Latitude: ", latitude," -- ", "Longitude: ", longitude)



address = rg.search((latitude, longitude)) # Get the address from location tuple returns a list

address_name = address[0]['name']

address_admin1 = address[0]['admin1']

address_admin2 = address[0]['admin2']

address_cc = address[0]['cc']

print("----Address----")

print(address_name, ", ", address_admin1, address_admin2, address_cc)

Not bad for a first Python script!

In general, you can greatly benefit from giving parts of your code names, by encapsulating them in functions. This makes it also re-usable and let's you add a docstring giving more detail on what this function does.

If you add a main function which you call under a if __name__ == "__main__": guard you can also import these functions from another script without all of your code running.

Instead of urllib.request, you can use the requests module, it even has a method to directly return a JSON object.

While it is nice that the astronauts response contains the number of astronauts in space, you could get the same information from calling len(people), which is $mathcal{O}(1)$ for Python lists.

Familiarize yourself with f-strings (Python 3.6+). They are a nice and compact way to write formatted strings, since they can contain arbitrary Python expressions (I used it for the address here).

import requests

import reverse_geocoder



def get_json(url):

    """Retrieve JSON object from url.



    Raises an exception if connection fails.

    """

    response = requests.get(url)

    response.raise_for_status()  # make sure an exception is raised if something goes wrong

    return response.json()



def get_astronauts():

    """Returns a list of all people currently in space"""

    url = "http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json"

    return get_json(url)['people']



def get_iss_location():

    """Returns the current latitude and longitude of the ISS"""

    url = "http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json"

    position = get_json(url)['iss_position']

    return position['latitude'], position['longitude']



def get_address(position):

    """Do a reverse lookup getting the closest address to a given position"""

    return reverse_geocoder.search(position)[0]



def main():

    astronauts_in_space = get_astronauts()

    print("People in space : ", len(astronauts_in_space))

    print("----NAMES----")

    for astronaut in astronauts_in_space:

        print(astronaut['name'])



    iss_position = get_iss_location()

    print("Latitude: ", position[0]," -- ", "Longitude: ", position[1])



    address = get_address(iss_position)

    print("----Address----")

    print(f"{address['name']}, {address['admin1']} {address['admin2']} {address['cc']}")



if __name__ == "__main__":

    main()