Why status codes communicate outcomes in Rest API - See It in Action

Why Status Codes Communicate Outcomes

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web API that returns different status codes to show if a request was successful or if there was an error. Status codes help the client understand what happened after they asked for something.

🎯 Goal: Create a small program that simulates API responses with status codes and messages. You will set up data for responses, configure a status code to check, write logic to pick the right message based on the code, and finally print the result.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called responses with exact status codes as keys and their messages as values

Create a variable called status_code and set it to an exact integer value

Write code to get the message from responses using status_code

Print the message exactly as retrieved from the dictionary

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs use status codes to tell clients if their request worked or if there was a problem. This helps apps and websites handle responses correctly.

💼 Career

Understanding status codes is important for backend developers, API designers, and anyone working with web services to communicate clearly with clients.

1

Create the API response messages dictionary

Create a dictionary called responses with these exact entries: 200: 'OK', 404: 'Not Found', 500: 'Internal Server Error'

Rest API

# Create the responses dictionary with status codes and messages
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with numbers as keys and strings as values.

2

Set the status code to check

Create a variable called status_code and set it to the integer 404

Rest API

responses = {200: 'OK', 404: 'Not Found', 500: 'Internal Server Error'}
# Set the status_code variable to 404
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 404 to the variable status_code.

3

Get the message for the status code

Create a variable called message and set it to the value from responses using the key status_code

Rest API

responses = {200: 'OK', 404: 'Not Found', 500: 'Internal Server Error'}
status_code = 404
# Get the message for the status_code from responses
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to get the value from the dictionary using the key.

4

Print the message

Write a print statement to display the value of the variable message

Rest API

responses = {200: 'OK', 404: 'Not Found', 500: 'Internal Server Error'}
status_code = 404
message = responses[status_code]
# Print the message
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(message) to show the message on the screen.