Decrease the number of lines of code needed to create a list and verify one value

Question

What can I do to reduce the number of steps until I get to the final code result?
Is it possible or is this the way with the least number of lines of code?

import requests
headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36"
    }
url = f'https://api.sofascore.com/api/v1/event/9567795/graph'
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers).json()
goal_minute = 88
graphs = response['graphPoints']
graph_minutes = graphs[-5:]
minutes_list = []
for minute in graph_minutes:
    minutes_list.append(minute["minute"])
if goal_minute in minutes_list:
    print('Ok')

Answer 1

Lines of code is typically not a useful metric. Many other characteristics are more important: correctness, robustness, readability, simplicity, and so forth. But even if we focus narrowly on code size, number of lines if usually the wrong way to think about it. Less code can be beneficial sometimes: if done well, for example, less code is easier to read than more code. But it's quite possible to have both more lines and less code (if the lines are short). Many short lines, especially if well organized into meaningful groups prefaced by substantive comments, are often easier to read and understand than a small number of long, dense lines of code.

You might need more code. HTTP requests can fail. You should probably be writing code to handle that scenario.

try:
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers).json()
except Exception as e:
    # Adjust after you decide how you want to respond to failure.
    print(e)
    quit()

The primary opportunity for brevity. You can collect the needed minutes in less code by dropping intermediate variables and using a comprehension. Although it could be written in a single line, why not help your reader a bit by laying it out nicely? Whitespace imposes no tax on the reader: be generous with it.

minutes = [
    d['minute']
    for d in response['graphPoints'][-5:]
]

Answer 2

In general, high line count is at most a code smell (i.e. a possible hint one should refactor). But if it is, that's because more declarative code might be clearer.

In this case, I want to discuss an unrelated issue we should address in such an attempt. Creating your list in the first place is unnecessarily eager. Your last if statement's boolean can be changed to any(minute['minute'] == goal_minute for minute in response['graphPoints'][-5:]). (I've still "wasted" a line making goal_minute, because == 88 isn't as clear in its significance.)

In a comment under @FMc's answer, @TamoghnaChowdhury suggested making a set instead of a list, which makes membership checking quicker. The smallest change to your original code to achieve this is using minutes_set = set() (then append becomes add); if you want something declarative instead of imperative, which reduces line count as you originally suggested, you can try goal_minute in {minute['minute'] for minute in response['graphPoints'][-5:]}. But I don't recommend this, because even a set is still eager, i.e. it takes up space we don't need. Admittedly, response['graphPoints'] has to be eager no matter what, but it's good to get into the habit of passing a generator to any. (If nothing else, it can be even faster if an example is found early.)