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headers in post request python

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Headers in Post Request Python

When making HTTP requests in Python, headers can be added to the request to provide additional information to the server. Headers typically include things like the user agent, content type, and authentication information.

Using the Requests Library

The most popular library for making HTTP requests in Python is requests. To include headers in a POST request using requests, you simply need to pass a dictionary of headers to the headers parameter:


import requests

url = 'https://example.com/api'
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',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN'
}
data = {'key': 'value'}

response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=data)

In this example, we're passing three headers to the request: User-Agent, Content-Type, and Authorization. We're also passing data as JSON using the json parameter.

Using the urllib Library

If you prefer to use the built-in urllib library instead of requests, you can add headers to a POST request by creating an instance of the urllib.request.Request class and passing headers as a dictionary to the add_header() method:


import urllib.request
import json

url = 'https://example.com/api'
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',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN'
}
data = {'key': 'value'}

req = urllib.request.Request(url=url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data).encode('utf-8'))
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)

Here we're creating an instance of urllib.request.Request and passing the URL, headers, and data as arguments. We're using the json.dumps() method to convert the data object to a JSON string and then encoding it as utf-8.

Conclusion

Both requests and urllib provide easy ways to add headers to a POST request in Python. Use whichever method you feel most comfortable with.

Remember that headers can contain sensitive information, such as authentication tokens, and should be treated accordingly.

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