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headers for python requests

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

Headers for Python Requests

If you're working with Python requests library, you might want to send some headers along with your requests. Headers are used to provide additional information about the request such as the user agent, authorization token, or content type.

Adding Headers

To add headers to your Python request, you can use the headers parameter in the request method. Here's an example:


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/537.36',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.get('https://example.com/api/v1', headers=headers)

In this example, we have added three headers: User-Agent, Authorization, and Content-Type. You can replace the values with your own headers.

Modifying Headers

If you want to modify existing headers in your request, you can use the update method of the headers dictionary. Here's an example:


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/537.36',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

headers.update({'Authorization': 'Bearer yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'})

response = requests.get('https://example.com/api/v1', headers=headers)

In this example, we have modified the value of the Authorization header to 'Bearer yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'.

Multiple Ways to Add Headers

There are multiple ways to add headers to your Python requests. Here are a few:

  • You can pass headers as a dictionary to the headers parameter
  • You can set headers as a class attribute of the request object
  • You can use the headers property of the response object to access the headers sent by the server

Here's an example of setting headers as a class attribute:


import requests

class CustomHeaders(requests.Session):
    def __init__(self, headers=None, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if headers:
            self.headers.update(headers)

headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

s = CustomHeaders(headers=headers)

response = s.get('https://example.com/api/v1')

In this example, we have created a custom class called CustomHeaders that inherits from requests.Session. We have overridden the __init__ method to accept a headers parameter and update the headers of the session object if provided.

With this custom class, we can set headers as a class attribute and reuse the same headers for multiple requests.

Conclusion

Headers are an essential part of HTTP requests, and Python requests library provides an easy way to add and modify headers. By specifying headers, you can control how your client interacts with the server and customize the request to your specific needs.

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