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Android

Posted by Joey Alban
Joey Alban
2,458 Points

How to find JSON data for a webpage

I've recently finished the "Getting Data from the Web" section of the Android Blog Reader App and I was wondering exactly how the URL for the JSON data was found. I'm looking to try and develop a similar app to this in the future with another forum and I can't seem to find the JSON data for it.

I know it has something to do with the "api" characters in the URL given in the lesson, but using that for the site I'm looking to use isn't working. Any insight on this would be much appreciated.

2 Answers

Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points
Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points

Hi Joey,

JSON data formats really depend on the software running behind the website itself, more common examples of JSON structures are Twitter feeds, Flicker feeds, Facebook authentication etc, based on the information above I don't think the course has said that the data source has to support JSON as a data type which most services do by default.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

An API is basically a way to programmatically consume data from a service. When a service like Twitter returns data from an API call it helps if it comes in a standard format, 2 such formats are XML & JSON.

So the short answer to your question is some blogs expose their data in JSON format to allow it to be programmatically consumed by say a blog reader app.

If you want to find blogs that use json, here's a google search that will help with that.

http://google.com/search?q=filetype:json

If a particular blog you are interested in offers data as rss but not json

You can probably use Yahoo Pipes to convert from RSS to JSON

see also: http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/yahoo-pipes-xml-json