Hawker (Food Centres) API

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Photo Credit: David Berkowitz (cc)

"A hawker centre or cooked food centre is an open-air complex in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Riau Islands housing many stalls that sell a variety of inexpensive food. They are typically found in city centres, near public housing estates or transport hubs (such as bus interchanges or train stations)."

Since moving to Singapore last July, hawker centers (or hawker centres; depending on where you are from) have been one unique part of my daily life. Due to working in the central business district area aka CBD of Singapore it wasn't difficult to become a fan of few nearby hawker centers. Maxwell Food Centre and Amoy Street Food Centre are my personal favorites.

And I decided to create a simple API that would store (hopefully) the entire list of hawker centers in Singapore. I was able to find public data through local government websites such as data.gov.sg and www.nea.gov.sg which allowed the data set to be created fairly at ease. The Hawker API data set includes names of the hawkers, number of stalls at each location and their addresses along with GPS coordinates.

So here's the Hawker API endpoint:
https://api.jael.ee/datasets/hawker

Also, authentication is not required for this API. Which means that the API is completely public and can be anonymously accessed. The Hawker API has two parameters to filter the results returned - "name", "postalcode".

The "name" parameter supports partial filtering by adding an asterisk symbol(*) on both ends of the string being searched. Here's a sample name search result https://api.jael.ee/datasets/hawker?name=*amoy*

The "postalcode" parameter can be filtered by range, supported for double types. Search results for a particular region can be performed by adding two periods in between the range values. Here's a sample postalcode search result https://api.jael.ee/datasets/hawker?postalcode=069000..069999

Lastly, this is a personal project for the purpose of demonstrating a sample use case, not intended for commercial use. For more details on the Hawker API please refer to the readme file available at https://github.com/leejaew/api.jael.ee/blob/master/hawker.md