Sorry for the long break. Once December started, I spent the first few weeks spending my coding time on Advent of Code, then just got sidetracked but now it's time to get going again.

This is the last elisp topic I specifically wanted to cover so this and the next video mmight be the end of this series, we'll see.

What are we doing today? Using a web API. Basically, if we want to use some external data source or facility a typical way to make that happen is through a web API. We could write our own, but for today we're going to use a free to use online thesaurus service. The idea is that we can send it a word and we'll get back synonyms. The end result will be, as we're writing, we hit the magic key, get a list of alternative words and then select one, or not.

The API we'll be using is at https://dictionaryapi.com/. It's part of Merriam-Webster's set of free to use tools. To use it, we have to go to this page and register to get an API key, then to use it to get synonyms for a word, you go to a url formatted like this:

where word is the word you want to lookup and MYKEY is the key you got when registering.

The result will be a string of data representing the JSON formatted response.

How do we do this?

First, to get the data, we can use elisp's url-retreive-synchronously. This takes a string with our url and returns a buffer with the results. In the video, we first show that we can use the switch-to-buffer function to go to the buffer with the results:

  (defvar key "mykey")
  (defvar base-url "https://dictionaryapi.com/api/v3/references/thesaurus/json/")
  (switch-to-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously (concat base-url "polite" "?key=" key)))

and then show how we can use with-current-buffer to take the buffer with our data and manipulate it before using the buffer-string function to return what we want.

Finally, we convert the json string into an elisp data structure, an array of arrays and hash tables using json-parse-string.

Here's the complete code:

    
  (defvar key "mykey")
  (defvar base-url "https://dictionaryapi.com/api/v3/references/thesaurus/json/")

  ;; Example using switch-to-buffer
  ;; (switch-to-buffer
  ;; (url-retrieve-synchronously (concat base-url "umpire" "?key=" key)))

  (defun get-synonyms (word)
    (let* ((url (concat base-url word "?key=" key))
  	 (resp (with-current-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously url)
  		 (goto-char (point-min))
  		 (re-search-forward "^$")
  		 (delete-region (point) (point-min))
  		 (buffer-string)))
  	 (json-resp (json-parse-string resp))
  	 )
      json-resp))

  (get-synonyms "umpire")

The video covers all the details. In the next installment, we'll see how we can take this json response, pull out the synonyms and easily replace the current word with one.