Accessing Propublica API with R

user_8821053 0
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I'm trying to send a GET request to the Propublica congress API using RStudio. Here's their webpage: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/propublica-congress-api

This is what my code looks like to retrieve data from the propublica API:

httr::add_headers("X-API-Key" = "[MY API KEY]")
baseUrl2 <- "https://api.propublica.org/congress/"
path2 <- "v1/"
fullURL2 <- paste0(baseUrl2, path2)
googleResult2 <- GET(fullURL2, query=list(address="[MY ADDRESS]", key= "[MY API KEY]"))
content(googleResult2, "text")

When I run this code, however, I get the error message: 

No encoding supplied: defaulting to UTF-8
"{\"message\":\"Missing Authentication Token\"}"

(I've replaced my actual API key and a shipping address that I'm currently using for [MY API KEY] and [MY ADDRESS] just for demonstration purposes.)

Running this code returns a 403 error when checking the googleResult2 variable. What should I do to fix my code and be able to access the site's API?

r api
1 Answers

It seems you just need to specify an endpoint, such as:

path2 <- "v1/115/senate/members.json"

for a list of members. Look at the documentation for other endpoints.

user_45036700
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