Goodreads API + Python = An Adventure

I've been playing around with the Goodreads for about a week. Here are some things I learned the hard way:

-Use rauth. I tried using oauth2 but kept getting a "Invalid OAuth Request" message. Then I realized it was a problem with the library. I somehow missed this sentence on the API documentation: We recommend using rauth instead of oauth2 since oauth2 hasn't been updated in quite a while.

-According to a developer message board on Goodreads, the Goodreads API only supports OAuth1 (for the indefinite future), so don't accidentally start using/reading the OAuth2Services or OAuth2Sessions sections of the rauth docs.

-Look at this. Very, very carefully. It will help you set up your request token so that your app's user can grant you access to make changes to the user's Goodreads account.

The examples on the aforementioned resource concerned setting up an OAuth1Session and adding a book to a user's shelf. Both very important, but nothing about how to GET information rather than POST information from/to a user's account.

Getting the user ID proved to be a challenge. Once a user has granted you access through rauth, the Goodreads API documentation says:

Basically this explains that it returns an xml response with the Goodreads user_id. However, the response will consist of more than just the user_id...you will have to do a bit of digging to find that exact information.

I created a function called get_user_id() that uses the GET url to get the xml object. 

user_stuff = session.get('/api/auth_user.xml')

Then use parseString (make sure you include this import statement at the top: from xml.dom.minidom import parseString) to parse the xml.

The important part is that you need to parse the xml content, not the xml object. 

xml_stuff = parseString(user_stuff.content) 

Now you're ready to getElementsByTagName. Thanks to Steve Kertes's code on github, I was able to figure out that user_id = xml_stuff.getElementsByTagName('user')[0].attributes['id].value

Now just return the str(user_id) and you're done! High five yourself. One small step for API experts, one giant leap for me. 

I owe a million thanks to this code, this, and this. Where would I be without the Internet???