vegibit

What Is Requests In Python Used For

,
Click to share! ⬇️

The requests library in Python is a library that allows you to send HTTP requests to a web server. It abstracts the complexities of making requests behind a beautiful, simple API so that you can focus on interacting with services and consuming data in your application. The requests library is an essential tool for any Python developer working with web APIs, and it is designed to make it easy to send HTTP requests and get response data from web servers.

How To Request Web Pages Using Python Requests

To request a web page using the Python requests library, you can use the requests.get() method. This method takes a URL as its first argument, and an optional second argument for any additional request parameters you want to include. For example, to request the homepage of the Python website, you could use the following code:

import requests

response = requests.get("https://www.python.org")

print(response.text)

This code will send an HTTP GET request to the URL specified, and the response will be printed to the console as plain text. You can also specify additional request parameters as a dictionary in the second argument of the request.get() method. For example, to include query string parameters in your request, you could use the following code:

import requests

response = requests.get("https://www.python.org", params={"q": "requests", "page": 2})

print(response.text)

In this case, the requests.get() method will send an HTTP GET request to the URL specified, with the q and page query string parameters included in the request. The response will again be printed to the console as plain text.

You can also use the requests.post() method to send an HTTP POST request, which is often used to submit data to a web server. For example, to send a POST request with some form data, you could use the following code:

import requests

response = requests.post("https://www.python.org", data={"name": "John Doe", "email": "john.doe@example.com"})

print(response.text)

In this case, the requests.post() method will send an HTTP POST request to the URL specified, with the name and email form fields included in the request body. The response will again be printed to the console as plain text.

How To Download Images Using Python Requests

To download an image using Python requests, you can use the following code:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com/image.jpg"
response = requests.get(url)

with open("image.jpg", "wb") as f:
    f.write(response.content)

This code will download the image from the specified URL and save it as “image.jpg” in the current directory.

Here’s an example that shows how to download multiple images and save them to a specific directory:

import os
import requests

# Create the directory where the images will be saved
directory = "C:/Users/YourUsername/Images"
if not os.path.exists(directory):
    os.makedirs(directory)

# URLs of the images to download
image_urls = ["https://www.example.com/image1.jpg",
              "https://www.example.com/image2.jpg",
              "https://www.example.com/image3.jpg"]

# Download and save the images
for url in image_urls:
    response = requests.get(url)
    file_name = os.path.join(directory, os.path.basename(url))
    with open(file_name, "wb") as f:
        f.write(response.content)

This code will download the images from the specified URLs and save them in the “C:/Users/YourUsername/Images” directory. It will also create the directory if it doesn’t exist.

How To Post Data Using Python Requests

To post data to a server using Python requests, you can use the following code:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com/post"
data = {"key1": "value1", "key2": "value2"}
response = requests.post(url, data=data)

print(response.text)

This code will send a POST request to the specified URL with the given data. The data is in the form of a dictionary, where the keys are the names of the data fields and the values are the values of those fields.

Here’s an example that shows how to post a JSON object:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com/post"
data = {"key1": "value1", "key2": "value2"}
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
response = requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers)

print(response.text)

This code will send a POST request with the given data in JSON format. It also sets the “Content-Type” header to “application/json” to indicate that the request body contains JSON data.

How To Read JSON Using Python Requests

To read JSON data using Python requests, you can use the json() method of the response object. This method parses the response as JSON and returns the resulting object.

Here’s an example that shows how to use the json() method to read JSON data from a server:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com/data.json"
response = requests.get(url)
data = response.json()

print(data)

This code sends a GET request to the specified URL and receives a response with JSON data. It then uses the json() method to parse the response and store the resulting object in the data variable.

You can access the individual fields of the JSON object using the dictionary syntax. For example, if the JSON object contains a field called “name”, you can access its value like this:

name = data["name"]

How To Handle Errors & Exceptions with Python Requests

To handle errors and exceptions with Python requests, you can use a try/except block. This allows you to catch any errors that occur when making the request and take appropriate action.

Here’s an example that shows how to use a try/except block to handle errors with requests:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com"

try:
    response = requests.get(url)
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as err:
    print(err)
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as err:
    print(err)
else:
    print(response.text)

This code sends a GET request to the specified URL. If an error occurs when making the request, it will be caught by the try/except block and the appropriate error message will be printed. If the request is successful, the response will be printed.

The raise_for_status() method is used to raise an HTTPError if the response contains an error status code. This allows you to catch specific error codes, such as 404 (not found) or 500 (internal server error), and handle them differently if needed.

Summary Of Requests Functions

The Python requests module is a HTTP library that provides methods for making various types of HTTP requests, including:

requests.get()

requests.get(): sends a GET request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

import requests

# Make the request
response = requests.get('http://www.example.com')

# Print the response
print(response.text)

The code imports the requests library, then uses the requests.get() method to make a GET request to the specified website. The response object is stored in a variable, which can then be used to access the response data, such as the response text, which is then printed to the screen.

requests.post()

requests.post(): sends a POST request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

The following code demonstrates an example of the Python Requests library’s requests.post() method. This method is used to send a POST request to a specified URL.

import requests

url = 'http://example.com/api/users/'
data = {'username': 'testuser', 'password': '1234'}

r = requests.post(url, data=data)

print(r.status_code)

In this example, the code imports the Requests library, defines a URL and a data dictionary containing username and password information, then sends a POST request to the URL containing the data. The response from the server is stored in the ‘r’ variable and the status code is printed to the console.

requests.put()

requests.put(): sends a PUT request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

This code sends a PUT request to the given URL with a JSON payload. It uses the requests library to make the request, and passes in the json argument with the payload data. The response is saved in the response variable.

import requests

url = 'http://example.com/api/users/123'
payload = {'name': 'John Doe', 'age': 23}

response = requests.put(url, json=payload)

requests.patch()

requests.patch(): sends a PATCH request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

import requests

url = 'http://example.com/user'

data = {
'name': 'John Doe'
}

r = requests.patch(url, data=data)

This code uses the requests.patch() method to send a PATCH request to the specified URL with the given data. This request is used to modify existing resources on the server.

requests.delete()

requests.delete(): sends a DELETE request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

The following example shows how to use the Python requests library to make a delete request:

import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com/user/123'

response = requests.delete(url)

# Check for successful deletion
if response.status_code == 204:
    print('User deleted successfully')

This code makes a delete request to the URL specified in the ‘url’ variable. The response object is checked for a successful deletion (status code 204) and a message is printed if successful.

requests.head()

requests.head(): sends a HEAD request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

The below example shows how to use the Python requests library to make a HEAD request to get the header information from a given URL.

import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'

response = requests.head(url)

# Print the response headers
print(response.headers)

# Print the status code
print(response.status_code)

This code will make a HEAD request to the URL provided and print out the response headers and status code. This can be used to get information about a given URL, such as the content type, server, and last modified date.

requests.options()

requests.options(): sends an OPTIONS request to a specified URL and returns a Response object containing the server’s response.

This example shows how to use the requests.options() function to send an OPTIONS request to a web server and get information about the server’s capabilities.

import requests

r = requests.options('http://www.example.com')
print(r.headers['Allow'])

The output of this code will be a string of allowed methods such as ‘GET’, ‘HEAD’, ‘POST’, etc. The requests.options() function sends an OPTIONS request to the specified URL and returns a response containing the server’s allowed methods.

Additionally, the requests module provides methods for handling other aspects of HTTP requests and responses, such as authentication, cookies, redirects, and more. Here are 4 examples of how requests is used on the Python ecosystem:

  1. Requests-HTML: Requests-HTML is a library that allows developers to perform HTTP requests and parse the returned HTML content. It uses the Python Requests module to perform the requests, and then parses the HTML content with lxml or html5lib or pyquery.
  2. Scrapy: Scrapy is a popular web scraping framework written in Python. It makes use of the Requests library to send HTTP requests, and then uses its own Scrapy Selectors to process the returned HTML content.
  3. Pandas: Pandas is a library for data analysis and manipulation. It provides a powerful data structure called a DataFrame which can be used to store and analyze large amounts of data. The Requests library is used to fetch data from the web, which can then be loaded into a DataFrame for analysis.
  4. Flask: Flask is a popular web framework for creating web applications in Python. It makes use of the Requests library to handle incoming client requests, and then uses its own routing and templating system to generate responses.

Learn more about what requests in Python is used for

Click to share! ⬇️

Create and Manage Threads with the Python threading Module Digging Deep Into Requests Interacting with the Web Using Requests Authentication In Python Requests python urllibPython Urllib Unit Testing Your Python Code with the unittest Module