How to parse an API in Ruby

In our previous sections on APIs, we were able to get the data we wanted from various APIs; however, the data that was returned wasn't very useful. In this section, we are going to learn how to parse the API so that we can get the data we want for further processing.

Let's go back to our Resty API and set up the code like this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'httparty'

class Resty
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'http://edutechional-resty.herokuapp.com'

  def posts
    self.class.get('/posts.json')
  end
end

resty = Resty.new
puts resty.posts

In this code, we used the httparty gem to call the Resty API; we also had a posts method to call the endpoint to retrieve the posts. From there, we simply printed out the response from the API. The resulting response will look something like this:

{"id"=>1, "title"=>"Test Blog Post", "description"=>"Here is the content", "url"=>"http://edutechional-resty.herokuapp.com/posts/1.json"}
{"id"=>2, "title"=>"Testing...