How to determine if my Python Requests call to API returns no data

Question

I have a query to an job board API using Python Requests. It then writes to a table, that is included in a web page. Sometimes the request will return no data(if there are no op

Answer 1

You have a couple of options depending on what the response actually is. I assume, case 3 applies best:

# 1. Test if response body contains sth.
if response.text:
    # ...

# 2. Handle error if deserialization fails (because of no text or bad format)
try:
    responses = response.json()
    # ...
except ValueError:
    # no JSON returned

# 3. check that .json() did NOT return an empty dict
if responses:
    # ...

# 4. safeguard against malformed data
try:
    data = responses[some_key][some_index][...][...]
except (IndexError, KeyError, TypeError):
    # data does not have the inner structure you expect

# 5. check if data is actually something useful (truthy in this example)
if data:
    # ...
else:
    # data is falsy ([], {}, None, 0, '', ...)