VanityURL checker in Python

Question

import requests
import json
import time
f = open('ok.txt', 'r')
c = f.read()
r = []
start = time.perf_counter()
def steamCheck(name):
 return requests.get("https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamUser/ResolveVanityURL/v0001/?key=removed&vanityurl=%s" % (name)).json()
for word in c.split():
 p = steamCheck(word)
 if p['response']['success'] == 42:
 with open('www.txt', 'a') as save:
 save.write(word + '\n')
 print('%s is available' % (word))
 r.append(word)
 else:
 print('%s is taken' % (word))
finish = time.perf_counter()
print(f'Finished in {round(finish-start, 2)} second(s)')

Hi this is a script I made to check if each word from a list exists as a vanityurl on steam or not. I removed the api key so if you wanted to test yourself you would have to get one here : https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey

I am a beginner in python and would like to know how you would change my script to make it better (faster, cleaner, etc..). So far it works as intended however it is fairly slow and believe I may be doing something inefficiently. Thanks for any advice you may have.

Example response from api if url is not taken:

{'response': {'success': 42, 'message': 'No match'}}

Example if the url IS taken:

{"response": {"steamid": "76561198868XXXXXX", "success": 1}}

• K.H.: Hi, would be good if you can provide example response of that api request to give us better idea of the code without having to get api key :-)
• humid: sorry about that @K.H. , i've added the 2 possible responses to the thread

Answer 1

This is a good start for a script. The next step should be separating in-/output from the functions doing the actual work.

In addition, whenever you make multiple requests to the same server, you should use a requests.Session, which will re-use the connection. You can also pass a dictionary params which will be the URL-encoded parameters for the request. The Session can take a default value for that.

You should always use with when opening a file or resource. This way it is ensured that it is closed properly, even if an exception occurs during the intervening code.

You can write multiple rows at once using writelines. You can even pass an iterable to this function and it will iterate for you.

I would write your script something like this:

import requests
URL = "https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamUser/ResolveVanityURL/v0001/"
PARAMS = {"key": "removed"}
def url_available(session, url):
 response = session.get(URL, params={"vanityurl": url}).json()
 return response['response']['success'] == 42
def main():
 session = requests.Session()
 session.params = PARAMS
 with open('ok.txt') as in_file, open('www.txt', 'w') as out_file:
 out_file.writelines(url for url in in_file
 if url_available(session, url.strip()))
if __name__ == "__main__":
 with Timer("main"):
 main()

To this you should add a docstring to each function describing what it does, but that is left as an exercise :).

Here Timer is a simple class that starts a timer when the context is entered and reports the result when the with block is finished:

from time import perf_counter
class Timer:
 def __init__(self, name):
 self.name = name
 def __enter__(self):
 self.start = perf_counter
 def __exit__(self, *args):
 diff = round(perf_counter() - self.start, 2)
 print(f'{self.name} finished in {diff} second(s)')

• humid: Thank you for your input, I will be sure to follow the advice you have given and this looks nice I will try my best to learn from this and implement it into my own code. @Graipher