U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics API Interactor

Purpose

The purpose of this package is to facilitate a user's interaction with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics API in connection with their personal interests and summarize and visualize the results in a Pandas Dataframe and PyPlot line plot. The data requested from the API is the U.S. city average, non-seasonally adjusted, Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers by month.

Pre-requisities

The following Python packages must be installed before using the module:

• pandas
• requests
• json
• ip2geotools
• python-dotenv
• os
• matplotlib

Set-up

The module works with V2 of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics API, which requires a personal API key. A blank .env file is provided with a place to insert your API key, which you can sign up for here.

Methods

def __init__(self, interest):

This is the initializer of the class.

Attributes:

• api_key: the user’s api_key for the database stored in the .env file

• interest: the user’s interest

• interest_Series: a list of series codes that relate to the user’s interest

• data: the relevant data from the database

• startyear: the start year of the data

• endyear: the end year of the data

Parameters:

• Interest: the user’s interest. Other functions in the class will use this to find series relevant to this interest.

Return:

• None

get_api_key(self):

This function gets the api key stored in the .env file for the user.

Parameters:

• None

Returns:

• the api key so that the user is able to request the data from the BLS API

def set_interest_Series(self):

Function to generate a list of relevant codes related to a user’s keyword input related to their interests.

Parameters:

• self (to initialize an object of the class, user already inputs an interest keyword)

Return:

• N/A (does not return anything, only updates values).

def get_request(self, start_year, end_year, series_list = None):

This function runs the API request to get the data from the BLS API related to specific series codes and assigns it to the self.data attribute.

Parameters:

• start_year: the year that the user will start begin getting data from

• end_year: the last year that the user will get data from

• series_list: The default value for this is none. If the user does not specify a list of series codes, the function will use the series codes that were generated by set_interest_Series().

Returns:

• None

def error_handling(self, response): Note: Nested and run in the get_request() method

This function handles the two error messages that a user might encounter with a failed API request by letting a user know if their request succeeded or failed, and ending their interaction with the program if the request fails or is not processed.

Parameters:

• response: the response from the BLS API server

Returns:

• None

def summary_stats(self):

Function to generate summary stats of the specified series.

Parameters:

• self (self.data already an attribute of the class)

Return:

• N/A (does not return anything, instead prints out the summary stats in a clean manner)

def visualizer(self):

Function to generate plots demonstrating change over time in the consumer price index.

Parameters:

• self (self.data, self.startyear, self.endyear already an attribute of the class that gets updated).

Return:

• N/A (does not return anything, instead generates a plot)