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header in python http request

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Header in Python HTTP Request

If you are working with web APIs using Python, then you might have come across the term "header" in the context of HTTP requests. A header is a piece of information that is sent along with an HTTP request or response to provide additional information about the request or response. In Python, you can include headers in HTTP requests using the requests library.

Adding Headers in Python HTTP Request

To add headers in the HTTP request using requests library, you can use the headers parameter of the requests.get() method. The headers parameter expects a dictionary of headers to be included in the request.


import requests

headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3',
    'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer your_access_token'
}

response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/', headers=headers)

In the above example, we are adding three headers to the request:

  • User-Agent: This header specifies the browser user agent string of the client making the request.
  • Accept-Language: This header specifies the preferred language of the client making the request.
  • Authorization: This header specifies an access token to authenticate the request.

Multiple Ways to Add Headers in Python HTTP Request

There are multiple ways to add headers in Python HTTP requests:

  • Passing headers as a dictionary to the headers parameter of the requests.get() method, as shown above.
  • Creating a Request object using the requests.Request() method and passing headers as a dictionary to the headers parameter of the Request object.
  • Using a session object created using the requests.Session() method to make multiple requests and persisting headers across all requests.

Overall, adding headers to HTTP requests is an important aspect of working with web APIs using Python. By including headers in your requests, you can provide additional information about your request and authenticate your API calls.

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