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Economic Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis |
The Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has enhanced the economic data services it provides by constructing an API (application programming interface), which allows users to create programs that retrieve data from our servers connected to the Internet.
With our new FRED® API, users may query our Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED®) and Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data (ALFRED®) databases to retrieve the specific data desired (according to source, release, category and series among other preferences).
Our API accommodates any programming language that can parse XML and communicate with our servers using HTTP. The FRED® API is based on the REST web service architecture. REST leverages familiar web technologies. Like a website, the FRED® API uses HTTP to receive requests and send responses. Also like a website, the FRED® API uses URLs to specify requests. This web service differs from a normal website by sending XML instead of HTML. HTML is a visual medium that's not always strictly formatted and flexible enough for arbitrary data structures. XML allows custom tags and relationships among tags.