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python requests add header

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests: Adding Headers to Your HTTP Requests

When making HTTP requests with Python's Requests library, you may need to include additional information in the headers of your requests. Headers are key-value pairs that provide additional information about the request being made, such as the user agent, content type, or authentication credentials.

Adding a Single Header

To add a single header to your request, you can use the headers parameter and pass in a dictionary with the header name and value as key-value pairs. Here's an example:


import requests

headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)

print(response.content)

In this example, we're adding a user agent header to the request, which tells the server what type of browser or client is making the request. We're using Mozilla/5.0 as the user agent string, which is a common string used by Firefox.

Adding Multiple Headers

If you need to add multiple headers to your request, you can simply add additional key-value pairs to the dictionary passed into the headers parameter. Here's an example:


import requests

headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer '
}

data = {}
response = requests.post('https://www.example.com/api', headers=headers, json=data)

print(response.content)

In this example, we're adding three headers to our request: a user agent header, a content type header specifying that we're sending JSON data, and an authorization header with a bearer token for authentication purposes.

Overriding Default Headers

By default, Requests sends a set of default headers with each request, such as an Accept-Encoding header specifying which compression algorithms the client supports. If you need to override one of these default headers or remove it entirely, you can set the header value to None. Here's an example:


import requests

headers = {'Accept-Encoding': None}
response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)

print(response.content)

In this example, we're telling Requests not to include an accept encoding header in the request, which means that the server won't attempt to compress the response before sending it back.

Conclusion

Adding headers to your HTTP requests with Python's Requests library is easy and can be done in just a few lines of code. By providing additional information in your headers, you can customize your requests and ensure that they are processed correctly by the server.

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