Dict not able to return data from college scorecard API

Question

So I've been working on a page which displays a school's name, url, city, state, zip, and student size via College Scorecard API but I'm getting tons of errors instead. However, the program is able to read the JSON data just fine. For example, when I run this:

key = "key_string_here"
url_base = "https://api.data.gov/ed/collegescorecard/v1/schools/"

# Makes a get request to collegescorecard API

r = requests.get("https://api.data.gov/ed/collegescorecard/v1/schools/? 
school.operating=1&2015.academics.program_available.assoc_or_bachelors=true&
2015.student.size__range=1..&school.degrees_awarded.predominant__range=1..3
&school.degrees_awarded.highest__range=2..4&id=240444&api_key=api_key_here")

school = r.json()
  for item in school:
      url = ("https://api.data.gov/ed/collegescorecard/v1/schools?"
             "school.operating=1&2015.academics.program_available"
             ".assoc_or_bachelors=true&2015.student.size__range=1.."
             "&school.degrees_awarded.predominant__range=1..3"
             "&school.degrees_awarded.highest__range=2..4&id=240444&"
             "api_key="+key+"&fields=school.name, school.school_url,"
             "school.city,school.zip,school.state,2015.student.size")
req = urllib2.Request(url)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
response2 = response.read()
json_data=json.loads(response2)
print response2

I get the correct data:

{"metadata":{"total":1,"page":0,"per_page":20},"results":[{"school.n
ame":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","school.zip":"53706-1380","sc
hool.state":"WI","2015.student.size":29579,"school.school_url":"www.
wisc.edu","school.city":"Madison"}]}

However, when I try to parse the JSON data in a dictionary, like this:

params = dict(
    school_name="University of Wisconsin-Madison",
    school_url="www.wisc.edu",
    city="Madison",
    state="WI",
    zip="53706-1380",
    size="29579"
)

resp = requests.get(url=url, params=params)
data = resp.json()
print data

I get this in response:

{u'errors': [{u'input': u'city', u'message': u"The input parameter '
city' is not known in this dataset.", u'error': u'parameter_not_foun
d'}, {u'input': u'state', u'message': u"The input parameter 'state'
is not known in this dataset.", u'error': u'parameter_not_found'}, {
u'input': u'school_url', u'message': u"The input parameter 'school_u
rl' is not known in this dataset.", u'error': u'parameter_not_found'
}, {u'input': u'school_name', u'message': u"The input parameter 'sch
ool_name' is not known in this dataset.", u'error': u'parameter_not_
found'}, {u'input': u'size', u'message': u"The input parameter 'size
' is not known in this dataset.", u'error': u'parameter_not_found'},
 {u'input': u'53706-1380', u'message': u"The provided zipcode, '5370
6-1380', is not valid.", u'parameter': u'zip', u'error': u'zipcode_e
rror'}]}

What am I doing wrong? How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

I am afraid I am not familiar with python, however, I notice that the variables in the API are formatted differently than what the API is expecting - for example, you have "city" defined in your dict, however, the API is expecting "school.city".

I am not sure if it is possible to include dots like this for this specific implementation of the API call? Hope that is somewhat helpful!