How to get a new API response in a Tkinter textbox?

In this article, we will look into how to make an API request and then insert it into a Tkinter textbox using Python, Before moving further we will cover some basic concepts related to our article that we will use frequently.

• Request: Requests are required to play with the web. If you want to use APIs, download entire Facebook pages, or do anything else nice, you’ll need to make a request to the URL. When it comes to REST APIs and Web scraping, requests are crucial.
• Tkinter: Tkinter is the most commonly used method. It’s a standard Python interface to the Python-supplied Tk GUI toolkit. The fastest and simplest approach to constructing GUI applications is with Python and Tkinter. Using Tkinter to create a GUI is a simple operation.
• API: APIs usually allow us to get information from a server which helps us in our projects. We make requests to APIs using different methods like example GET, POST, etc

Packages Required

To make a GUI we need to install Tkinter.

pip install tkinter

To make an API request, we usually use a python library called requests. 

pip install requests

Stepwise Implementation

Step 1:  Making an API request

To make a GET request to an API, we use the requests.get() method. For this tutorial, we will be using an Open-Source API called Quotable. It has a route ‘/random’ which gives us a random quote.

Python3

import requests

# Response Object
r = requests.get('https://api.quotable.io/random')

Step 2: Getting the data from the API Request

Usually, APIs return the data in a JSON format. But, our requests library makes it easier for us and converts it into a python dictionary object. We can get that data by the r.json() method:

Python3

import requests

r = requests.get('https://api.quotable.io/random')
data = r.json()

Output:

{‘_id’: ‘w4QwG7e8hNr7’, ‘tags’: [‘famous-quotes’], ‘content’: ‘The only Zen you find on the tops 
of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.’, ‘author’: ‘Robert M. Pirsig’, ‘authorSlug’: ‘robert-m-pirsig’, ‘length’: 77, ‘dateAdded’: ‘2019-02-17’, ‘dateModified’: ‘2019-02-17’}

Step 4: In this dictionary, we only import data that are present in the ‘content’ key which we can further store in a variable

quote = data['content']

Step 5: Creating a basic Tkinter App

So, here we have a very basic Tkinter app with a Textbox and a button

Python3

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import END, Text
from tkinter.ttk import Button

root = tk.Tk()
root.title('Quoter')
text_box = Text(root, height=10, width=50)
get_button = Button(root, text="Get Quote", command=get_quote)

text_box.pack()
get_button.pack()
root.mainloop()

Step 6: Creating an API Request function

We will now make a function that will get the data from the API, and edit the Text Box with that data:

• The text_box.delete() deletes all the text that is currently in the TextBox widget from the specified Index. In this case, It’s from 1.0 to the end which means the whole TextBox will be cleared.
• The text_box.insert() inserts data into the TextBox from the specified index. As the index is END, which in our case will be the first index, It will insert the quote obtained from the API to the TextBox.

Python3

def get_quote():
    r = requests.get('https://api.quotable.io/random')
    data = r.json()
    quote = data['content']
    text_box.delete('1.0', END)
    text_box.insert(END, quote)

Code Implementation

Python3

# import library
import requests
import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import END, Text
from tkinter.ttk import Button

# create a main window
root = tk.Tk()
root.title('Quoter')

# function that will get the data
# from the API
def get_quote():
    # API request
    r = requests.get('https://api.quotable.io/random')
    data = r.json()
    quote = data['content']

    # deletes all the text that is currently
    # in the TextBox
    text_box.delete('1.0', END)

    # inserts new data into the TextBox
    text_box.insert(END, quote)


text_box = Text(root, height=10, width=50)
get_button = Button(root, text="Get Quote", command=get_quote)

text_box.pack()
get_button.pack()
root.mainloop()

Output:

Clicking the button would generate a new quote: