Installation

Install the package using pip:

pip install requests

Core HTTP Methods

Executing GET Requests

When retrieving data, query parameters and headers can be passed directly. Dictionaries provided to the params argument are automatically URL-encoded.

import requests

search_criteria = {'q': 'python'}
http_headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36"
}

resp = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/get", params=search_criteria, headers=http_headers)

print(resp.status_code)
print(resp.encoding)
print(resp.url)
print(resp.text)

Output:

200
utf-8
https://httpbin.org/get?q=python
...

Executing POST Requests

To submit data to a server, use the post method. Data can be sent as form-encoded data, raw bytes, or JSON. Passing a dictionary to the parameter automatically serializes the payload and sets the Content-Type header to application/.

import requests

api_endpoint = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
request_body = {'key1': 'value1'}

result = requests.post(api_endpoint, =request_body)
print(result.())

Output:

{'args': {}, 'data': '{"key1": "value1"}', 'files': {}, 'form': {}, 'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/', ...}, '': {'key1': 'value1'}, 'origin': '...', 'url': 'https://httpbin.org/post'}

Injecting Headers and Cookies

Custom headers and cookies can be supplied as dictionaries to their respective parameters.

import requests

endpoint = 'https://httpbin.org/get'
custom_headers = {'X-Custom-Header': 'app-v1'}
auth_cookies = {'session_id': 'xyz789'}

output = requests.get(endpoint, headers=custom_headers, cookies=auth_cookies)
print(output.())

Managing SSL Certificate Verification

Encountering SSL verification errors is common when working with environments using self-signed certificates. Setting verify=False bypasses the certificate check, and the resulting warnings can be suppressed using urllib3.

import requests
import urllib3

urllib3.disable_warnings(urllib3.exceptions.InsecureRequestWarning)

secure_url = 'https://self-signed.badssl.com/'
response = requests.get(secure_url, verify=False)
print(response.status_code)