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python requests example with headers

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

Python Requests Example with Headers

If you're looking to make HTTP requests in Python, the requests library is a great choice. It's simple to use and doesn't require any external dependencies.

What are Headers?

Headers are pieces of information that can be sent along with an HTTP request or response. They provide additional information about the request or response, such as the content type or the user agent.

How to Use Headers with Requests

To include headers in your requests with Python's requests library, you can simply pass a dictionary containing the headers to the headers parameter of the request functions. 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/537.36',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)

In this example, we're sending two headers with our request: the user agent and the content type. We're using a dictionary to define these headers and passing it to the headers parameter of the get function.

Multiple Ways to Define Headers with Requests

There are multiple ways to define headers when making requests with Python's requests library. Here are a few examples:

  • Passing headers as a dictionary, as shown in the example above
  • Using the headers parameter with a string of headers in the format 'Header-Name: header-value'
  • Using the headers parameter with a list of tuples, where each tuple contains a header name and value

Here's an example of using the headers parameter with a string of headers:


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/537.36\r\nContent-Type: application/json'

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)

In this example, we're using a string to define our headers, separating each header with a newline character and a carriage return. This is equivalent to passing a dictionary of headers.

Here's an example of using the headers parameter with a list of tuples:


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/537.36'),
    ('Content-Type', 'application/json')
]

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)

In this example, we're using a list of tuples to define our headers, where each tuple contains a header name and value.

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