Docs / Quotes Data API / Endpoints / Retrieve a quotation

Retrieve a quotation

Returns one quotation by id.

GET https://api.softon.dev/v1/quotes/{id} Copy

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
`id` required	string	The quotation id from a list response. Ids are `<source>:<source_id>` and are stable for the life of the record. Quotations carry a `birjob:` prefix because that is the name of the corpus they were imported from — the same project this platform's crawler used to run under, which is why it still answers to `BirJobBot`. It is a name, not a namespace you need to handle: treat the whole string as opaque and store it as you received it. It is not going to change, because an id you already hold changing would cost you a re-import to buy us a tidier prefix.

Request

curl https://api.softon.dev/v1/quotes/birjob:1766 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOFTON_KEY"

req, _ := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, "GET",
    "https://api.softon.dev/v1/quotes/birjob:1766", nil)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("SOFTON_KEY"))

res, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }
defer res.Body.Close()

var page struct {
    Data Quote `json:"data"`
    Meta struct{ Next *string `json:"next"` } `json:"meta"`
}
if err := json.NewDecoder(res.Body).Decode(&page); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

import json, os, urllib.parse, urllib.request

url = "https://api.softon.dev/v1/quotes/birjob:1766"
req = urllib.request.Request(url, headers={
    "Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SOFTON_KEY"],
})
page = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req))
# page["data"] is the object; page["error"] is None on success

const url = new URL("https://api.softon.dev/v1/quotes/birjob:1766");

const res = await fetch(url, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.SOFTON_KEY}` },
});
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`${res.status} ${await res.text()}`);
const { data, meta } = await res.json();

Response

The envelope is identical on every softon.dev API: data, meta, error. Only the shape inside data changes per dataset — see the response envelope.

{
  "data": {
    "id": "birjob:1663",
    "source": "birjob",
    "text": "Let us see what love can do.",
    "author": null,
    "category": "Love",
    "origin": "passiton",
    "ingested_at": "2026-08-06T07:29:46.646799Z"
  },
  "meta": { "request_id": "req_9Fv3" },
  "error": null
}

Fields of `data`

Field	Type	Description
`id`	string	Stable identifier, "<source>:<source id>".
`source`	string	Which scraper delivered this quotation.
`text`	string	The quotation.
`author`	string · nullable	Attributed author. null where the collection does not name one.
`category`	string · nullable	The upstream's own label. A folksonomy, not an enum -- tens of thousands of distinct values -- so treat it as a tag rather than a fixed set.
`origin`	string · nullable	Where the quotation was collected from, e.g. "passiton". Distinct from source, which is the scraper that delivered it.
`ingested_at`	timestamp	When this version was stored.

Try it

Send the request to see a response.