Requests

The Basics of Requests

Requests is the library for making HTTP requests. It allows you to interact to consume data in an application.

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GET

GET is when you are trying to get data from a source.

Simply use response = requests.get(‘https://api.github.com’).

You can also pass parameters: response = requests.get(‘https://api.github.com/search/repositories’,params={‘q’: ‘requests+language:python’}).

You can further limit the GET by adding a parameters section where you specify the headers via dictionary.

POST

POST is when you are going to send data to a source.

Status Codes

A status code informs you of the status of a request. 200 means successful. 404 NOT FOUND means it did not work. 204 means succesful but no content

Content

Once you’ve “GOT” the request, you can say response.content which gives the raw output. You’ll often want to convert into a string via UTF-8 which can be done via response.text.

If the content is JSON, it can easily be translated via response.json() which become a dictionary and values are accessible via the appropriate keys.

You might want to check out the headers, the column names, via response.headers.