Examples

Here is a selection of possible ways to use pokebase to help you access PokéAPI. Obviously they can’t all be listed, but if you think of another good example you would like to add yourself, submit a pull request with your new example on GitHub. New examples are always welcome!

Simple Usage

The best way to get familiar with pokebase/PokéAPI is to open up a session in the Python interactive interpreter!

>>> import pokebase as pb
>>> bulba = pb.pokemon(1)
>>> for type_slot in bulba.types:
...     print('{}: {}'.format(type_slot.slot, type_slot.type.name.title()))
...
1: Grass
2: Poison
>>> bulba.base_experience
64
>>> pound = pb.move('pound')
>>> pound.accuracy
100
>>> pound.type.name.title()
'Normal'

Check out the PokéAPI docs for even more use-cases, information, and data examples.

Getting All Pokémon Names from a Generation

In this example, we want to print out the name of every Pokémon that was introduced in a given generation of Pokémon games.

import pokebase as pb

# View Pokemon from this generation number.
GENERATION = 2

# Get API data associated with that particular generation.
gen_resource = pb.generation(GENERATION)

# Iterate through the list of Pokemon introduced in that generation.
for pokemon in gen_resource.pokemon_species:
    print(pokemon.name.title())

Finding Moves of a Certain Type

A quick ‘n’ dirty method to do this is to get a list of every move, check its type, and then print it if the type matches our searched type. And this is exactly what I did when writing this example. But there’s a better way (we’ll get to that in a second). Here’s the bad example:

import pokebase as pb

# Print all moves of the type named here.
TYPE = 'normal'

# Get a list of EVERY move from the API.
all_moves = pb.APIResourceList('move')

# Bad method. Don't actually do this.
for move_data in all_moves:
    # Get API data for this move.
    move = pb.move(move_data['name'])

    # Print its name, if its type matches.
    if move.type.name == TYPE:
        print(move.name)

But sometimes the API has done work for you already. Looking in the docs for types, we see that each type resource has a moves method. Here’s the better code.

import pokebase as pb

# Print all moves of the type named here.
TYPE = 'normal'

# Good method.
# Get API data associated with the type we want.
type_moves = pb.type_(TYPE).moves

# Iterate & print.
for move in type_moves:
    print(move.name)

The first example is poor is because it calls the API signicantly more times than this second example does (once for every move, as opposed to only calling the API for each move in the type’s list of moves). The second method guarantees that whenever we call the API for a move, we know it has the type that we’re looking for. The more API calls you have, the slower your script runs.

Making a Type Chart

For this example, we want to write a function to find the type multiplier when any one Pokémon type attacks any other. This could be useful if you wanted to make a move damage calculator or a game to test your knowledge of the Pokémon type chart.

import pokebase as pb

TYPES = ['normal', 'fighting', 'flying', 'poison', 'ground', 'rock', 'bug', 'ghost', 'steel', 'fire', 'water', 'grass', 'electric', 'psychic', 'ice', 'dragon', 'dark', 'fairy']

def type_multiplyer(attack, defense):
    # Get API data for the attcking type.
    atk_type = pb.type_(attack)

    # Check which damage_relation list the defense is in. Matches by name
    if defense in [t.name for t in atk_type.damage_relations.no_damage_to]:
        return 0.0
    elif defense in [t.name for t in atk_type.damage_relations.half_damage_to]:
        return 0.5
    elif defense in [t.name for t in atk_type.damage_relations.double_damage_to]:
        return 2.0
    else:
        return 1.0