GET and POST

To interact with the Wikipedia and Twitter APIs, we're going to be using HTTP requests, which are a combination of a url plus a method and sometimes parameters. Whenever you use a website, whether clicking in a browser or through an API, you are making HTTP requests.

Here's an example of an HTTP request, where the url is "https://twitter.com/search" (Twitter's search page), the method is GET, and the one parameter in the request is "q=pancakes."

https://twitter.com/search?q=pancakes

Although the url and parameters are visible in this example, the method is a little more abstract.

GET and POST are types of HTTP methods. There are several different types of HTTP requests that have different purposes.

• GET requests bring data from a website to the person or robot who requested it. For example, if you go to the url https://twitter.com/search?q=pancakes, you're just going to get tweets about pancakes. You're not giving tweeting anything new about pancakes. Parameters for GET requests are visible in the url.
• POST requests push data from a person or robot to a website. If you go to Twitter to tweet about how much you love pancakes, you're making a POST request. Unlike a GET request, you won't be able to see POST parameters from the url bar of your browser.
• There are a few other HTTP request methods such as DELETE and PATCH, but we won't be covering them in this tutorial.

Don't worry if these seem confusing or not intuitive. Any decent API documentation, like the ones provided by Wikipedia and Twitter, will tell you the exact url, method, and parameters needed to make requests. We'll go over how to read API documentation in the next section.