Wrapping Access to Web-Services in R-functions.

One of the great features of R is the possibility to quickly access web-services. While some companies have the habit and policy to document their APIs, there is still a large chunk of undocumented but great web-services that help the regular data scientist. In the following short post, I will show how we can turn a simple web-serivce in a nice R-function. The example I am going to use is the linguee translation service: DeepL. Just as google translate, Deepl features a simple text field. When a user types in text, the translation appears in a second textbox. Users can choose between the languages. In order to see how the service works in the backend, let’s have a quick look at the network traffic. For that we open the browser’s developer tools and jump to the network tab. Next, we type in a sentence and see which requests (XHR) are made. The interface repeatedly sends JSON requests to the following endpoint: “https://www.deepl.com/jsonrpc”. Looking at a single request we can quickly identify the parameters that we typed in (grey area, in the lower right corner). We copy these in r and assign them to a variable.