xkcd API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://xkcd.com/info.0.json

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 395 bytes · compressed

Response time

29 ms (median of 3) · fastest 19 ms

Transport

TLSv1.2 · ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 · certificate issued by GlobalSign nv-sa

Browser CORS

No Access-Control-Allow-Origin header — call it from a server, not the browser

Served by

nginx

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://xkcd.com/info.0.json on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

{
  "month": "8",
  "num": 3283,
  "link": "",
  "year": "2026",
  "news": "",
  "safe_title": "Size and Lifespan",
  "transcript": "",
  "alt": "With their 13 years recording and performing together and two humans worth of mass, the White Stripes are sandwiched neatly between gray wolves and blue whales.",
  "img": "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/size_and_lifespan.png",
  "title": "Size and Lifespan",
  "day": "10"
}

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://xkcd.com/";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://xkcd.com/"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl https://xkcd.com/info.0.json

What Can You Build?

// Fetch character or game data
const response = await fetch(`https://xkcd.com/json.html`);
const data = await response.json();
const items = data.results || data.characters || data.data || [data];
const characters = Array.isArray(items) ? items : [items];
characters.slice(0, 5).forEach(c => {
  console.log(`🎮 ${c.name || c.title}: ${c.description || 'No description'}`);
});

// Get random trivia or game fact
const response = await fetch(`https://xkcd.com/json.html`);
const data = await response.json();
const trivia = data.results?.[0] || data;
console.log('Trivia:', trivia.question || trivia.text || JSON.stringify(trivia));
if (trivia.correct_answer) {
  console.log('Answer:', trivia.correct_answer);
}

// Fetch game statistics
const response = await fetch(`https://xkcd.com/json.html`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log('Game data from xkcd:', data);
const entries = Array.isArray(data) ? data : data.data || data.results || [data];
entries.slice(0, 5).forEach((entry, i) => {
  console.log(`#${i+1}: ${entry.name || entry.title} - Score: ${entry.score || 'N/A'}`);
});

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.