Python Api Request With Error Handling England Wales Bank Holidays

Python API Request with Error Handling: England & Wales Bank Holidays

A brief example of using the requests library in Python to query an API, in this case the gov.uk Bank Holidays API.

The output of this function is a list of bank holiday dates, using a stored list if the API is not available (as it was during the Fastly internet outage in June 2021.

The goal here is to provide reasonable informative error messages printed to console.

def get_bank_holidays():
    """
    Uses the gov.uk API bank holiday API. Returns a list of dates of England and Wales bank holidays in yyyy-mm-dd format.
    """

    default_dates = ['2016-01-01', '2016-03-25', '2016-03-28', '2016-05-02', '2016-05-30', '2016-08-29', '2016-12-26', '2016-12-27', '2017-01-02', '2017-04-14', '2017-04-17',
    '2017-05-01', '2017-05-29', '2017-08-28', '2017-12-25', '2017-12-26', '2018-01-01', '2018-03-30', '2018-04-02', '2018-05-07', '2018-05-28', '2018-08-27', '2018-12-25',
    '2018-12-26', '2019-01-01', '2019-04-19', '2019-04-22', '2019-05-06', '2019-05-27', '2019-08-26', '2019-12-25', '2019-12-26', '2020-01-01', '2020-04-10', '2020-04-13',
    '2020-05-08', '2020-05-25', '2020-08-31', '2020-12-25', '2020-12-28', '2021-01-01', '2021-04-02', '2021-04-05', '2021-05-03', '2021-05-31', '2021-08-30', '2021-12-27',
    '2021-12-28', '2022-01-03', '2022-04-15', '2022-04-18', '2022-05-02', '2022-06-02', '2022-06-03', '2022-08-29', '2022-12-26', '2022-12-27']

    use_default_dates = False

    params = {
        "division":"england-and-wales"
    }

    try:
        response = requests.get("https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json",params=params)

        if response.status_code != 200:
            print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
            use_default_dates = True


    except requests.exceptions.SSLError as errssl:
        print("SSL Error:", errssl)
        print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
        use_default_dates = True

    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as errh:
        print ("Http Error:",errh)
        print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
        use_default_dates = True
    except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as errc:
        print ("Error Connecting:",errc)
        print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
        use_default_dates = True
    except requests.exceptions.Timeout as errt:
        print ("Timeout Error:",errt)
        print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
        use_default_dates = True
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as err:
        print ("Error accessing Bank Holiday API",err)
        print("USING STORED BANK HOLIDAY DATES")
        use_default_dates = True

    if use_default_dates == False:
        response_dict = response.json()
        events = response_dict["england-and-wales"]["events"]
        dates = []

        for event in events:
            dates.append(event["date"])

    else:
        dates = default_dates

    return dates