How to restrict fields returned by stackexchange api, and turn off paging? - json

Question

I'd like to have a list of just the current titles for all questions in one of the smaller (less than 10,000 questions) stackexchange site. I tried the interactive utility here: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/questions and it both reports the result as a json at the bottom, and produces the requesting url at the top. For example:
https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions?order=desc&sort=activity&tagged=apples&site=cooking
returns this JSON in my browser:
{"items":[{"tags":["apples","crumble"],"owner":{ ...
...
...],"has_more":true,"quota_max":300,"quota_remaining":252}
What is quota? It was 10,000 on one search on one site, but suddenly it's only 300 here.
I won't be doing this very often, what I'd like is the quickest way to edit that (or similar of course) url so I can get a list of all of the titles on a small site. I don't understand how to use paging, and I don't need any of the other fields. I don't care if I get them, but I'm thinking if I exclude them I can have more at once.
If I need to script it, python (2.7) is my preferred (only) language.

Answer 1

quota_max is the number of requests your application is allowed per day. 300 is the default for an unregistered application. This used to be mentioned directly on the page describing throttles, but seems to have been removed. Here is historical information describing the default.
To increase this to 10,000, you need to register an application and then authenticate by passing an access token in your script.
To get all titles on a site, you can use a Python library to help:
StackAPI. The answer below will use this library. DISCLAIMER: I wrote this library
Py-StackExchange
SEAPI
StackPy
Assuming you have registered your application and authenticated we can proceed.
First, install StackAPI (documentation):
pip install stackapi
This code will then grab the 10,000 most recent questions (max_pages * page_size) for the site hardwarerecs. Each page costs you one API hit, so the more items per page, the few API calls.
from stackapi import StackAPI
SITE = StackAPI('hardwarerecs')
SITE.page_size = 100
SITE.max_pages = 100
# Filter to only get question title and link
filter = '!BHMIbze0EQ*ved8LyoO6rNjkuLgHPR'
questions = SITE.fetch('questions', filter=filter)
In the questions variable is a dictionary that looks very similar to the API output, except that the library did all the paging for you. Your data is in questions['data'] and, in this case, contains a list of dictionaries that look like this:
[
...
{u'link': u'http://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/29/sound-board-to-replace-a-gl2200-in-a-house-of-worship-foh-setting',
u'title': u'Sound board to replace a GL2200 in a house-of-worship FOH setting?'},
{ u'link': u'http://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/31/passive-gps-tracker-logger',
u'title': u'Passive GPS tracker/logger'}
...
]
This result set is limited to only the title and the link because of the filter we applied. You can find the appropriate filter by adjusting what fields you want in the web UI and copying the filter field.
The hardwarerecs parameter that is passed when creating the SITE parameter is the first part of the site's domain URL. Alternatively, you can find it by looking at the api_site_parameter for your site when looking at the /sites end point.