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headers in python requests

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

Headers in Python Requests

If you are working with Python requests, you may need to add headers to your requests to provide additional information about the request. Headers are used to pass additional information to the server, such as authentication credentials, user agent information, and more.

Let's take a look at how to add headers to a Python request using the requests library. The requests library is a popular third-party library for making HTTP requests in Python.

Adding Headers to a Request

To add headers to a request, you can use the headers parameter when making the request. Here is an example:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'
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'}

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

print(response.content)

This code sends a GET request to 'https://www.example.com' with a custom User-Agent header. The User-Agent header is used to identify the client making the request, and can be used by the server to deliver different content based on the client's capabilities or preferences.

Other Ways to Add Headers

In addition to adding headers using the headers parameter, you can also add headers using other parameters or methods provided by the requests library.

  • The auth parameter can be used to specify authentication credentials for the request.
  • The cookies parameter can be used to specify cookies to include with the request.
  • The proxies parameter can be used to specify proxy servers to use for the request.
  • The headers property of the request object can be used to set or modify headers after the request has been created.

Here is an example of setting headers using the headers property:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'
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'}

response = requests.get(url)
response.headers.update(headers)

print(response.content)

This code sends a GET request to 'https://www.example.com' and then updates the response object's headers property with the custom headers.

Conclusion

Headers are an essential part of making HTTP requests in Python. They allow you to provide additional information to the server and can be used for authentication, user agent identification, and more. By using the requests library, you can easily add headers to your requests and customize them to fit your needs.

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