requests — HTTP for Humans™

While Python has the built-in urllib module, the requests library is the universally accepted standard for making HTTP requests in Python. It is an external library that must be installed via pip, but it is so ubiquitous that it is often treated as part of the ecosystem.

Note: This is a third-party library. To install it, run pip install requests.

import requests

Basic GET Request

Making a request with requests is incredibly straightforward compared to urllib. Note how JSON parsing is built right in!

import requests

# Make a GET request
response = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events')

# Check the status code (e.g. 200 is OK, 404 is Not Found)
print(response.status_code)

# Check the final URL (useful if you got redirected)
print(response.url)

# Print the text content of the response
print(response.text)

# If the response is JSON, you can decode it immediately!
data = response.json()
print(data[0]['id'])

Sending Data (POST Request)

Sending JSON, uploading files, or submitting forms is handled magically for you.

import requests

url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
my_payload = {'username': 'bob', 'password': '123'}

# To send a Form (x-www-form-urlencoded):
r1 = requests.post(url, data=my_payload)

# To send pure JSON (automatically sets headers!):
r2 = requests.post(url, json=my_payload)

print(r2.text)

Adding Headers and Parameters

import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/search'
query_params = {'limit': 10, 'q': 'python'}
custom_headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_TOKEN'}

response = requests.get(
    url, 
    params=query_params, 
    headers=custom_headers,
    timeout=5 # Never forget a timeout!
)

API Reference

Core Request Methods

All these methods return a Response object.

Vital Parameters (**kwargs)

Passed into any of the request methods above.

Response Object Attributes