Skip to content
OpenAQ Python SDK

Paging results

By design, the OpenAQ API and the Python SDK return only a subset of the data when a query matches too much data to fit in one response. To get all data matching a query, work with pagination as covered in this guide.

The Pagination page covers how meta.found in the query response can be an integer or a string, depending on how computationally expensive counting the matching records becomes. Two approaches exist for getting all results.

Get all records with exact count

Section titled “Get all records with exact count”

Most resources will return the total count of record in meta.found as an integer. In those cases, you can use this exact record count to paginate through the entire result set:

from openaq import OpenAQ
import math


client = OpenAQ(api_key="replace-with-valid-openaq-api-key")


limit = 100
locations = []
first_page = client.locations.list(iso="VN", page=1, limit=limit)


# Paginate through sets of results
try:
    total_pages = math.ceil(first_page.meta.found / limit)


    locations.extend(first_page.results)
    for page in range(2, total_pages + 1):
        response = client.locations.list(page=page, limit=limit)
        locations.extend(response.results)


except TypeError:
    print("Records count in meta.found is not a valid number.")


client.close()

Get all records with any response

Section titled “Get all records with any response”

A large result such as that coming from querying measurements, where the amount of data is often too large for an exact record count to return reliably and efficiently. In this case, meta.found returns the string '>1000', indicating that the result it too large to count exactly in an efficient way. When filtering can’t narrow down the results further, the code below paginates through the entire result set until no records remain. This code also handles the case preceding this one, where an exact count of records is available.

from openaq import OpenAQ


# Initialize client
client = OpenAQ(api_key="replace-with-valid-openaq-api-key")


# Paginate through locations results set
results = True
limit = 1000
page_num = 1
locations = []


while results:
    response = client.locations.list(page=page_num, limit=limit)
    locations.extend(response.results)
    page_num += 1


    if response.meta.found == 0:
        results = False


client.close()