Building a Telegram bot: the words API

In the first post of this series we created our Telegram bot and managed to make it reply to any message with a fixed response.

Today we'll go a step forward and connect it to the API to start searching for words.

The words API 🎧

We'll be using the WordsAPI. The endpoint we'll need is

GET https://wordsapiv1.p.mashape.com/words/{word}

This will perform a search with the word we provide as a parameter on the URL and return the results with a lot of info about the word, in our case, we'll only use the definition, synonyms, antonyms, and examples of use.
You can check out this Postman collection to give it a try:

Creating the API client 🔄

We'll create a Go package that will help us make requests to the API. The package will live in the pkg/words folder.
To be initialized, it will need the baseURL, the token, and an http client:

type API struct {
    token   string
    baseURL string
    client  *http.Client
}

func New(baseURL, token string, client *http.Client) *API {
    return &API{
        token:   token,
        baseURL: baseURL,
        client:  client,
    }
}

Then we'll need a struct in which to store the JSON resulting from the request to the API. For our use case, we don't need all the properties that the request will return, we can specify on the Go struct the ones we need:

type responsePayload struct {
    Word    string   `json:"word"`
    Results []Result `json:"results"`
}

type Result struct {
    Definition string   `json:"definition"`
    Synonyms   []string `json:"synonyms,omitempty"`
    Antonyms   []string `json:"antonyms,omitempty"`
    Examples   []string `json:"examples"`
}

Last but not least, we need to create the function that will make the actual request. We will pass the word as a parameter and add the x-rapidapi-key with our token:

func (api *API) Word(word string) ([]Result, error) {
    url := fmt.Sprintf("%s/%s", api.baseURL, word)

    // create the request to the words endpoint
    req, err := http.NewRequest(http.MethodGet, url, nil)
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    // add the token to the headers
    req.Header.Add("x-rapidapi-key", api.token)

    // make the request
    res, err := api.client.Do(req)
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    // read the response
    body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(res.Body)
    defer res.Body.Close()
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    // parse the json
    var payload responsePayload
    err = json.Unmarshal(body, &payload)
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    return payload.Results, nil
}

With that, we have everything we need to interact with the WordsAPI, we can give it a try like this:

api := New("https://wordsapiv1.p.rapidapi.com/words", "{the_token}", http.DefaultClient)
result, _ := api.Word("big")

Check the code here: https://github.com/albarin/dictiobot/tree/02-the-words-api

In the next and last post of this series, we'll tie everything together and show the results of the word search in Telegram.

See you soon! 👋

Blog

Building a Telegram bot: the words API

Alba Rincón

The words API 🎧

Creating the API client 🔄

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