Requests

Requests is a fantastic open-source library for sending HTTP requests. Requests abstracts away the details and complications of the standard libary urllib module. Requests can be installed with pip install requests.

HTTP Method requests
GET requests.get(url, params=None, **kwargs)
POST requests.post(url, data=None, json=None, **kwargs)
OPTIONS requests.options(url, **kwargs)
HEAD requests.head(url, **kwargs)
PUT requests.put(url, data=None, **kwargs)
DELETE requests.delete(url, **kwargs)
PATCH requests.patch(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Simple Get Request

To see how easy using requests is, let’s just make a get request for the James Heath Blog.

import requests

blog_url = 'https://blog.jamesfheath.com'
# Response object contains all you need
response = requests.get(blog_url)

print(response.status_code)
# 200

# String of the HTML
print(response.text)
# '<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html lang="en">\n\n<link re...'

# Prints out the raw HTML bytes
print(response.content)
# b'<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html lang="en">\n\n<link re...'

National Weather Service API

Requests is great for communicating with APIs. Let’s try out some requests with query parameters and headers. The National Weather Service has an open API that we can use to test requests out.

import requests

weather_url = 'https://api.weather.gov'
# We will ask for a list of weather stations
stations_url = f'{weather_url}/stations'

# Header to give our identity
headers = {'User-Agent': '(jamesfheath.com, jamesheathradford@gmail.com)'}

# Asking for 10 stations from North Carolina or Virginia
params = {'state': ['NC', 'VA'],
          'limit': 10}

response = requests.get(url=station_url, headers=headers, params=params)

# JSON response as a Python dict
print(response.json())
# {'@context': ['https://geojson.org/geojson-ld/geojson-context.jsonld',
#  {'@version': '1.1',}
# ...

# Use Python syntax to operate on the dict
print(response.json()['features'][1]['properties']['name'])
# 'KG4EUF Virginia Beach'

# String response
print(response.text)
# '{\n    "@context": [\n        "https://geojson.org/geojson-ld/geojson-context.jsonld",\n

Anything you need to specify will be passed into the HTTP method you choose. Some common examples are timeout and authorization. Mostly, requests just works exactly how you hope it would, and it makes your life dealing with HTTP simple.