Error codes for machine consumption in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Error Codes for Machine Consumption

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns error codes in a way machines can easily understand. This helps other programs know exactly what went wrong.

🎯 Goal: Create a small API response structure with error codes and messages that machines can read and use.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called error_codes with exact error code keys and message values

Create a variable called requested_code with a specific error code string

Use a dictionary lookup to get the error message for requested_code

Print the error message exactly as retrieved from the dictionary

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs often send error codes and messages so other programs can understand what went wrong and respond correctly.

💼 Career

Knowing how to structure error responses is important for backend developers and anyone working with APIs.

1

Create the error codes dictionary

Create a dictionary called error_codes with these exact entries: '404': 'Not Found', '500': 'Internal Server Error', '403': 'Forbidden'

Rest API

# Create the error_codes dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with string keys and string values.

2

Set the requested error code

Create a variable called requested_code and set it to the string '404'

Rest API

error_codes = {'404': 'Not Found', '500': 'Internal Server Error', '403': 'Forbidden'}
# Set requested_code to '404'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string '404' to the variable requested_code.

3

Lookup the error message

Create a variable called error_message and set it to the value from error_codes using the key requested_code

Rest API

error_codes = {'404': 'Not Found', '500': 'Internal Server Error', '403': 'Forbidden'}
requested_code = '404'
# Lookup the error message for requested_code
# Your code here

Need a hint?

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

4

Print the error message

Write a print statement to display the value of error_message

Rest API

error_codes = {'404': 'Not Found', '500': 'Internal Server Error', '403': 'Forbidden'}
requested_code = '404'
error_message = error_codes[requested_code]
# Print the error_message
# Your code here

Need a hint?

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