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python and api requests

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python and API Requests

API requests are an essential part of any modern web application as they allow us to interact with various third-party APIs and fetch data. Python provides an easy-to-use library called requests that simplifies the process of sending HTTP/1.1 requests using Python.

Installation

To use the requests library, we first need to install it. We can install it using pip, which is the package installer for Python.

pip install requests

Sending HTTP Requests

We can use the requests library to send various types of HTTP requests such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. Here's an example of sending a GET request:

import requests

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

print(response.status_code)  # 200
print(response.content)  # b'{\"message\":\"Hello, world!\","documentation_url":"https://docs.github.com/v3"}'

In the above example, we first import the requests library and then send a GET request to the GitHub API. We then print the status code and content of the response.

Handling JSON Responses

Most modern APIs return data in JSON format. We can use the json() method provided by the requests library to convert the JSON response to a Python dictionary. Here's an example:

import requests

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

data = response.json()

print(data['message'])  # Hello, world!

In the above example, we first send a GET request to the GitHub API and then convert the response to a Python dictionary using the json() method. We then print the value of the message key in the dictionary.

Sending Headers and Query Parameters

We can send headers and query parameters along with our API requests. 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/537.3'
}

params = {
    'q': 'Python Requests',
    'page': 2
}

response = requests.get('https://www.google.com/search', headers=headers, params=params)

print(response.content)

In the above example, we first define the headers and query parameters that we want to send along with our GET request. We then send the request to Google Search and print the content of the response.

Conclusion

The requests library in Python provides an easy-to-use interface for sending HTTP requests and fetching data from APIs. It's a powerful tool that can be used to build modern web applications that interact with various third-party APIs.

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