Accessing a (new-style, public) Google sheet as JSON

Question

How can I access the contents of a (new-style) Google sheet a JSON? My aim is to access the values from JavaScript, so I need to be able to download the JSON via HTTP.

Answer 1

I have finally (kind of) solved my problem. Just for future reference, and in case somebody else runs into the same troubles, here the solution I came up with:

1. To make the worksheet publicly accessible, one needs to make the worksheet publicly accessible. This is done in the Google Sheets web interface, using the menu entries File > Publish to the web ... > link > publish. It is possible to either publish the whole spreadsheet or individual worksheets.

2. An API to access data from Google Sheets programmatically is described on the Google Sheets API web pages. This API uses URLS of the form https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/.../key/worksheetId/.... Slightly oddly, the meaning of key and worksheetId seems not to be explained in the API documentation.

   My experiments show that the key value can be found by taking part of the URLs used to access the sheet via the web interface (see also here). The key is everything after the /d/, until the next slash. For the spreadsheet in the question, the key is thus 1mhv1lpzufTruZhzrY-ms0ciDVKYiFJLWCMpi4OOuqvI. The worksheetId seems to be an integer, giving the position of the worksheet in the spreadsheet. For the example in the question one has to know that the sheet shown is the second worksheet, the worksheetId in this case is 2.

   The API defined public and private requests. To access an exported resource without authentication, public requests must be used.

3. The API calls to get data from the spreadsheet are explained in the section "Retrieving a list-based feed" (click on the "Protocol" tab in the examples). The URL required extract the data from the spreadsheet in the question is

   https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/1mhv1lpzufTruZhzrY-ms0ciDVKYiFJLWCMpi4OOuqvI/2/public/full

   A HTTP GET request to this URL returns that data as XML. (I have not found a way to get the data as JSON.)

4. The usual protections agains cross-site requests make it difficult to access the data via JavaScript XML RPC calls in a web app. One way around this problem is to proxy the API calls through the web server (e.g. using nginx's proxy_pass directive).

The above steps are at least a partial solution to the problem in the question. The only difficulty is that the data is returned as XML rather than as JSON. Since the API documentation does not mention JSON, maybe it is not possible any more to extract the data in this format?