News API in Python - Take II

From my previous post, I tried to take into account all of the nice answers made by Kate, Chris, J_H, Booboo and mudskipper

Changes made

In short, I attempted to apply all of the following:

1. API key handling
2. Better URL construction
3. Input cleaning improvements
4. Category detection rewrite
5. More functions
6. Article formatting cleanup
7. Added error handling
8. Replaced hard-coded strings with constants
9. PEP8 & Style corrections
10. Added a __main__ entry point
11. Simplified logic flow

API key changes

I noticed not long ago that NewsAPI prefers to keep all API keys for private use only. You may get yours here. I am in no way promoting them.

Code

Here is the updated Python code:

"""
This script fetches the most recent news
headline from the NewsAPI service based 
on a natural-language query given by the 
user (e.g., “latest technology news”, 
“what’s happening in sports today”, etc.).
"""
import os
import re
import requests
import json5

# Constants / configuration
API_URL = "https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines"
CATEGORIES = ("business", "entertainment", "general", "health", "science", "sports", "technology")
STOP_WORDS = [
    "news", "new", "for", "concerning", "can", "you", "give", "me",
    "the", "most", "recent", "in", "category", "currently", "current",
    "now", "what", "whats", "is", "about", "today"
]

def clean_query(text: str) -> str:
    """
    Clean the input text by removing stop words, then detect if
    any category is mentioned. Return query parameter as string.
    """
    text = text.lower()
    # remove stop words with word boundaries
    pattern = re.compile(r"\b(" + "|".join(re.escape(w) for w in STOP_WORDS) + r")\b", flags=re.IGNORECASE)
    text = pattern.sub("", text).strip()

    # detect categories
    for cat in CATEGORIES:
        if re.search(rf"\b{re.escape(cat)}\b", text, flags=re.IGNORECASE):
            return {"category": cat}

    # if nothing remains, default to general
    if not text:
        return {"category": "general"}

    # else treat as search query
    return {"q": text}

def fetch_top_headline(params: dict, api_key: str) -> dict:
    """
    Fetches the top headline from NewsAPI with the given params.
    Raises on HTTP error.
    """
    params = params.copy()
    params.update({
        "sortBy": "publishedAt",
        "pageSize": 1,
    })
    # Prefer putting API key in header for security
    headers = {"X-Api-Key": api_key}
    response = requests.get(API_URL, params=params, headers=headers)
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()

def format_article(article: dict) -> str:
    """
    Given a single article dict, extract its fields and return a nice string.
    """
    source_name = article.get("source", {}).get("name", "")
    author = article.get("author")
    title = article.get("title", "")
    desc = article.get("description") or ""

    # clean up title
    title = title.replace(source_name, "").replace("\n", " ")
    title = title.replace(" - ", " ").replace("LISTEN | ", "")

    # clean up description (if HTML-like)
    if "<p>" in desc:
        desc = desc.split("<p>", 1)[1]
    # here you might want to use BeautifulSoup instead of manual replace
    desc = desc.replace("&quot;", '"')

    # author formatting
    if author and author.lower() != source_name.lower():
        # clean commas
        cleaned = author.replace(",", " and ")
        author_part = f" by {cleaned}"
    else:
        author_part = ""

    # source formatting
    source_part = f" on {source_name}" if source_name else ""

    return f"Here is the recently published news I found{source_part}{author_part}:\n" \
           f"The title is {title}...\n{desc}"

def news_concerning(text: str) -> str:
    """
    Main function that takes user text, queries NewsAPI, and returns a formatted result.
    """
    api_key = os.getenv("NEWS_API_KEY")
    if not api_key:
        raise RuntimeError("API key not found. Please set NEWS_API_KEY in your environment.")

    params = clean_query(text)
    data = fetch_top_headline(params, api_key)

    articles = data.get("articles", [])
    if not articles:
        # Nothing found
        query_term = params.get("q") or params.get("category")
        return f"I couldn’t find anything about {query_term}. Could you try a different query?"

    first = articles[0]
    try:
        return format_article(first)
    except Exception as e:
        # Fallback error message
        return "Sorry, I couldn’t format the article properly."

if __name__ == "__main__":
    user_input = input("What news would you like to hear about? ")
    print(news_concerning(user_input))

To run the script, enter the following: NEWS_API_KEY="your_api_key_here" python3 NewsAPI.py

Critique request

Please, tell me anything that comes to mind.