For this exercise, let's create our own basic Quakebot.
You'll need a combination of skills to complete this exercise:
- How to request remote data using the
requestslibrary - How to work with an API in Python (really, a feed in this case)
- How to convert a timestamp
- An understanding of how to work with JSON data
- How to create a story template using "f-strings" or other string templating support in Python
The task is to write a script called quakebot.py that ingests the "All earthquakes" feed for
the past hour from the USGS:
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/summary/all_hour.geojson
And print text to the command line that looks like below:
Note, your data values for number of quakes and specific quake details will vary as this feed updates frequently.
There were 6 earthquakes in the last hour:
- Magnitude 2.00999999 4 km S of Pāhala, Hawaii at 2021-02-01 20:16:02 UTC
- Magnitude 1.07 17km E of Ocotillo, CA at 2021-02-01 20:03:18 UTC
- Magnitude 2.83 4 km W of Lucien, Oklahoma at 2021-02-01 19:49:10 UTC
- Magnitude 1.94000006 8 km ENE of Pāhala, Hawaii at 2021-02-01 19:47:54 UTC
- Magnitude 0.82 13km N of Borrego Springs, CA at 2021-02-01 19:42:53 UTC
- Magnitude 1.8 8 km WNW of Houston, Alaska at 2021-02-01 19:37:00 UTC
The USGS provides the time of quakes in what's known as epoch time, typically the number of seconds since the beginning of the year 1970. The USGS time is actually in milliseconds since 1970, so you'll need to divide the time by 1000 and then investigate the utcfromtimestamp method in the datetime module to convert the time.