Skip to main content
Practice

Overview of the Requests Library

requests is a prominent library in Python used to handle HTTP requests and responses. It is utilized for web scraping, API (Application Programming Interface) requests, and managing various web requests and responses.

Note: API refers to an interface defining the communication protocols between a server and client.


Features of requests​

  1. Simple to use: A straightforward API makes the handling of HTTP requests and responses easy.

  2. Support for various HTTP methods: Offers support for different HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.

  3. Convenient response handling: Enables simple handling of response data such as status codes, text, and JSON through response objects.


GET Request​

To request data from a webpage or an API, a GET request is sent using the requests.get() function.

requests GET Request Example
import requests

# Send a GET request to a webpage and receive a response
response = requests.get('https://example.com')
print(response.text)  # Output the HTML received in response

POST Request​

When sending data to a server or requesting certain operations, a POST request is sent using the requests.post() function.

requests POST Request Example
# Send a POST request to the server
payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
response = requests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data=payload)

res = response.text  # Save the response into the res variable
print(res)

Handling Response Objects​

  • response.status_code: Returns the HTTP status code (e.g., 200, 404).

  • response.headers: Returns the response headers as a dictionary.

  • response.json(): Converts the JSON response to a Python object.


Practice​

Press the Run Code button on the right side of the screen to see the crawling results or modify the code!

Want to learn more?

Join CodeFriends Plus membership or enroll in a course to start your journey.