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how to parse python requests response

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

How to Parse Python Requests Response

When working with APIs or scraping websites, it is common to use Python's requests library to send HTTP requests and receive responses. However, the response from the server is often in a format that is not immediately usable. In this blog post, we will explore how to parse the response in Python.

What is a Response Object?

When we send a request using the requests library, we get a Response object in return. This object contains the server's response to our request. The response object has several attributes and methods that we can use to access the data in the response.

Parsing JSON Response

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a popular format for data interchange between applications. If the response from the server is in JSON format, we can use the json() method of the response object to parse it.


import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.github.com/users/username/repos')
data = response.json()

print(data)

In this example, we are sending a GET request to the GitHub API to retrieve a list of repositories for a user. The response from the server is in JSON format. We use the json() method to parse the response and store it in the data variable.

We can now access any key-value pair in the parsed JSON data by using its key.


print(data[0]['name'])

This will print the name of the first repository in the list.

Parsing XML Response

If the response from the server is in XML format, we can use Python's built-in ElementTree module to parse it.


import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

response = requests.get('https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml')
root = ET.fromstring(response.content)

print(root.tag)

In this example, we are sending a GET request to a sample XML file hosted on W3Schools. We use the fromstring() method of the ElementTree module to parse the response and store it in the root variable.

We can now access any element in the parsed XML data by using its tag.


for child in root:
    print(child.tag, child.attrib)

This will print the tag and attributes of each child element of the root element.

Parsing HTML Response

If the response from the server is in HTML format, we can use Python's built-in BeautifulSoup module to parse it.


import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

response = requests.get('https://www.python.org/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')

print(soup.title.string)

In this example, we are sending a GET request to the Python website. We use the BeautifulSoup constructor to parse the response and store it in the soup variable.

We can now access any element in the parsed HTML data using its tag or CSS class.


for link in soup.find_all('a'):
    print(link.get('href'))

This will print the href attribute of all anchor tags in the HTML.

Conclusion

Parsing responses in Python is essential for working with APIs and scraping websites. In this blog post, we explored how to parse JSON, XML, and HTML responses using Python's built-in modules and libraries. By using the appropriate parsing method, we can extract the data we need from the response and use it in our applications.

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