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JavaScript Create a Reusable Fetch Function

(data.message) question

I know the data is the data from the fetch request but what is the "message" part?

1 Answer

Travis Alstrand
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Travis Alstrand
Data Analysis Techdegree Graduate 45,998 Points

The message property on the object returned from the api (which we've given the name data to) is what holds the list of breed names in this situation. It's a property that the creators of the api specifically made / named for that purpose, so other apis may name it something different, that's why it's always important to read the documentation on an api you'd like to work with.

Like Guil has done with fetch() in the video here, if you just type

https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/list

into your browser and submit that, you'll see the JSON response (I use Chrome and the JSONview extension which helps make it more readable) and you'll see the layout of the response clearly.

Of course, if you're following / coding along with the video or ever using an api with fetch you can console.log it like so

fetch("https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/list")
    .then(response => respose.json())
    .then(data => console.log(data));

I hope that helps and makes sense!