How to get athleteId from first/last name using ESPN APIs? - espn

Question

Using ESPN's developer API's, you can query for news on a specific athlete using the 'athleteId'. See the Methods section of their docs:
http://developer.espn.com/docs/headlines#parameters
If you look up a player profile you can find the athlete id in the url of the page, but my question is how can we find this id using solely the APIs? With just the athlete's name?

Answer 1

If you go to a team's roster page, use inspect element, or whatever equivalent for the browser you use, and look at the table element of all the players on the team. Within the 'td' tags, you'll find a player ID. You could scrape the screen, store all of the player ids locally, and then use them as parameters in your api calls.
This is merely a suggestion, but it should work, if the id that is used on the page is the same as the id needed to get that player's information in api.

Answer 2

As stated, it's all available in the api:
import requests
import pandas as pd
url = 'https://sports.core.api.espn.com/v3/sports/football/nfl/athletes?limit=18000'
jsonData = requests.get(url).json()
players = pd.DataFrame(jsonData['items']).dropna(subset='firstName')
players = players[['id', 'fullName']].dropna()
Output:
print(players)
id fullName
6 14856 Isaako Aaitui
7 3058033 Manny Abad
8 16836 Jared Abbrederis
9 2576467 Mehdi Abdesmad
10 14466 Isa Abdul-Quddus
... ...
16920 16424 Mike Zupancic
16921 15462 Markus Zusevics
16922 11317 Jeremy Zuttah
16923 4294520 Brandon Zylstra
16924 4608362 Shane Zylstra
[16919 rows x 2 columns]

Answer 3

All NFL player ID can be found on this page
https://sports.core.api.espn.com/v3/sports/football/nfl/athletes?limit=18000
This will return all NFL players ID , name and DOB
function GetESPNIds() {
var url = 'https://sports.core.api.espn.com/v3/sports/football/nfl/athletes?limit=20000';
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: url,
success: function (data) {
for (var i=0;i<data.items.length;i++) {
if(data.items[i].hasOwnProperty("lastName") && data.items[i].hasOwnProperty("firstName") && data.items[i].hasOwnProperty("dateOfBirth")) {
console.log("Name: "+data.items[i].lastName+","+data.items[i].firstName +" ID: " +data.items[i].id +" DOB: " +data.items[i].dateOfBirth);
}
}
}
});
}
GetESPNIds();