Technical Overview
Note: Be sure to read through our API overview before you begin development.
The Yelp APIs are REST (REpresentational State Transfer) APIs and users of these APIs will be able to:
- retrieve business review and rating information for a particular geographic region or location.
- display review information for a particular business.
- determine accurate neighborhood name information for a particular location.
- track recent reviews for a particular business.
- display pictures of highly rated local businesses and of the top reviewers for that business.
- determine a particular business' review and rating information based on the phone number for that business.
The default output is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), this output format was chosen due to the availability of JSON parsers in many languages. For more details on JSON and to obtain parsers please reference www.json.org.
Common API Parameters
The following parameter must be included in all API requests.
Required
| Name | Data Type | Required / Optional | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| YWSID | string | required | The "Yelp Web Service ID" (ywsid) that was provided when access to the Yelp API was granted. |
Optional
| Name | Data Type | Required / Optional | Description | Potential Values |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| output | string | optional | Enables response to be requested in different formats. If this parameter is not specified the default format of JSON will be used. | "json" - JavaScript Object Notation. "pickle" - serialized python response. "php" - serialized php response |