Fetch Available Listings

Learn how to get the lists of available categories, cuisines, and ingredients available in the database.

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TheMealDB API provides a variety of filters that we may use to filter the available meals. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to retrieve the listings whose values we can use to filter the meals.

Retrieve lists

We get the lists of items we can use to filter the meals using the base URI, https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/list.php.

This endpoint provides three types of lists, which are as follows:

  1. Categories list
  2. Cuisines list
  3. Ingredients list

Request parameters

We can use any one of the following query parameters with this endpoint:

Parameters

Type

Category

Description

c

String

Optional

Used to get all available categories in the response

a

String

Optional

Used to get the list of available cuisines

i

String

Optional

Used to get all the available ingredients from the database

Note: We need to use at least one of these parameters with this endpoint. If we call it without any query parameters, it will return an error.

The query parameter c is used to get the list of available categories. The value assigned to c will be list. The widget below contains the code which fetches this list.

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const endpointUrl = new URL('https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/list.php');
const queryParameters = new URLSearchParams({
  c: 'list'
});
const options = {
  method: 'GET'
};
async function fetchLists() {
  try {
    endpointUrl.search = queryParameters;
    const response = await fetch(endpointUrl, options);
    printResponse(response);
  } 
  catch (error) {
    printError(error);
  }
}
fetchLists();

A brief explanation of the above code is given below:

  • Line 1: We define the URL of the endpoint.
  • Lines 3–9: We define the query parameter and HTTP request type to call the endpoint.
  • Lines 11–21: We define the fetchLists() function that calls the endpoint and prints the response.
  • Line 23: We call the fetchLists() function.

We can get the list of available cuisines by replacing query parameter, c, in line 4 with a.

Similarly, if we replace c in line 4 with i, we’ll get the list of available ingredients in response. We can use the list of ingredients we get in response to filter the available meals based on the ingredients.

Response fields

The table below contains some important response fields provided by this endpoint:

Response field

Associated query parameter

Type

Description

strCategory

c

String

The name of the category, which can be used to filter specific types of meals

strArea

a

String

The available cuisines

IDIngredient

i

Integer

The API-assigned ID of the ingredient

strIngredient1

i

String

The name of the ingredient provided by the API

strDescription

i

String

Information about the ingredient