fillerama api seems to be back up.

[mnr]

Description

fillerama API seems to work fine, so I uncommented the related code. As a precaution, I've wrapped the jsonlite call with try() to trap out api errors.

Related Issue

Example

say(what="futurama") # this should work.

[sckott]

Thanks @mnr

@aedobbyn Thoughts on this? I'm thinking maybe we don't rely on this API that could go down again probably pretty easily.

[mnr]

I've been pointing to cowsay in a couple of R weekly sessions. One of my students pointed out the missing "lorem ipsum" - no big deal if this is removed - but just to let you know...

[mnr]

oops - didn't mean to close the pull

[aedobbyn]

thanks @mnr!

I'm thinking maybe we don't rely on this API that could go down again probably pretty easily.

hmm yeah... how often has it gone down? I'm not at all attached to it so my instinct would also be to just remove, but if we want to keep it in maybe we handle errors with a tryCatch or a purrr::possibly?

[mnr]

I put in a simple try(,,) but only to keep it from crashing out - nothing graceful.

Would you like me to add a more interesting handler if the API isn't available? I'd be happy to close this pull, add something more elegant, then re-pull....

[aedobbyn]

Yeah I think something that lets the user know what's going on if the API is down makes more sense. Either that or we take this out entirely. Up to you @sckott

[sckott]

Okay, we can keep it.

However, there needs to be better error handling. e.g,

what <- try(jsonlite::fromJSON(paste0('http://api.chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama/get.php?count=1&format=json&show=', what))$db$quote )
if (inherits(what, "try-error")) stop(what)

haven't tested that, but something like that

If code is left as is right now, then on an error it would just return futurama as the string in the output because what would retain its original value as passed in by the user

[mnr]

I've added filleramaIsBroken to substitute something when the fillerama api is broken. I would LOVE to return something appropriate to "what" but can't seem to figure out how to pass that variable to filleramaIsBroken. Please let me know if I'm missing something obvious.

[aedobbyn]

If I'm understanding what you want to do, you could do something like

if (what %in% c("arresteddevelopment", "doctorwho", "dexter", "futurama", "holygrail", "simpsons", "starwars", "loremipsum")) {
    what_orig <- what

    check4jsonlite()
    what <- tryCatch(
      jsonlite::fromJSON(paste0("http://api.chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama/get.php?count=1&format=json&show=", what))$db$quote,
      error =
        function(e) {
          return(paste0("`", what_orig, "` isn't available right now :("))
        }
    )
  }

so that would return

> say(what = "starwars")

 -------------- 
`starwars` isn't available right now :( 
 --------------
    \
      \
        \
            |\___/|
          ==) ^Y^ (==
            \  ^  /
             )=*=(
            /     \
            |     |
           /| | | |\
           \| | |_|/\
      jgs  //_// ___/
               \_)

Or if you want it to say something besides just what_orig you could make a key-value dataframe for the phrase you want it to say given a what_orig if that makes sense

[sckott]

nice one @aedobbyn , looks good

[mnr]

Thanks @aedobbyn !

I was trying to incorporate a separate function to keep all the awkward error handling elsewhere. But Amanda's solution works great.

[aedobbyn]

cool! you could definitely pull that into a function if you wanted to. up to you!

[mnr]

let me clean up and resubmit...