[API] newsAPI

Access to breaking news headlines and articles from over 30,000 news sources and blogs through the newsAPI API.

Database description

The package newsAPI is an API wrapper/R client for accessing https://newsapi.org.

API KEY

Go to newsapi.org and register to get an API KEY. Save the key as an environment variable.

# API key (this is a fake API Key copy paste your own)
NEWSAPI_KEY <- "4345e85e8ae1427480xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

# save your API Key in your environment
cat(
  paste0("NEWSAPI_KEY=", NEWSAPI_KEY),
  append = TRUE,
  fill = TRUE,
  file = file.path("~", ".Renviron")
)

Functions

This package gives access to breaking news headlines, and articles from over 30,000 news sources and blogs.

• get_sources()
• get_articles()

Each of these functions are detailed in this course and some examples are provided.

get_sources()

This method allows you to search for news sources by language. For example, to find all english language news sources, use the following code:

# invoke library
library(newsAPI)

# get all english language news sources (made available by newsapi.org)
src <- get_sources(language = "en")

# preview data
print(src, width = 500)

get_articles

Once you have identified news source names (IDs) pas them to the get_articles() function. The following code, for example, retrive all articles from the search above.

## apply get_articles function to each news source
df <- lapply(src$id, get_articles)

## collapse into single data frame
df <- do.call("rbind", df)

## preview data
print(df, width = 500)

tl;dr

# invoke library
library(newsAPI)

# get all english language news sources (made available by newsapi.org)
src <- get_sources(language = "en")

# preview data
print(src, width = 500)

## apply get_articles function to each news source
df <- lapply(src$id, get_articles)

## collapse into single data frame
df <- do.call("rbind", df)

## preview data
print(df, width = 500)

Code learned this week

Command	Detail
get_sources()	Search for news source names (IDs)
get_articles()	Get data by news source names (IDs)

References

This tutorial uses the newsAPI package documentation