how does python requests work

How does Python Requests work?

Python Requests is a popular library used for making HTTP requests in Python. It is a simple and elegant library that provides an easy-to-use interface to send HTTP/1.1 requests using Python. It can be used to interact with APIs, scraping web pages, and more.

Installation

To use Requests, you need to install it first. You can easily install it using pip, the package installer for Python.


pip install requests

Sending a GET request

The most common HTTP request method is GET, which is used to retrieve data from a web server. Here is an example of how to send a GET request using Requests:


import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')

print(response.status_code)
print(response.content)

In the above example, we have imported the Requests library and sent a GET request to the GitHub API. The response object contains the server's response to our request. We can access the status code and the content of the response using the status_code and content attributes of the response object, respectively.

Sending POST, PUT, and DELETE requests

Requests also supports other HTTP request methods like POST, PUT, and DELETE. Here is an example of how to send a POST request:


import requests

url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}

response = requests.post(url, data=payload)

print(response.content)

In the above example, we have sent a POST request to the httpbin.org website. The request data is sent as a dictionary using the data parameter. The response content is printed using the content attribute.

Conclusion

Requests library provides an easy-to-use interface to send HTTP requests. It supports all the major HTTP request methods and provides various parameters to customize the request. It is a powerful library that can be used for various purposes like API interaction, web scraping, and more.