python requests exception handling

Python Requests Exception Handling

Python Requests is a popular library used for making HTTP requests in Python. However, it is important to handle exceptions that may occur during the request process.

HTTP Errors

When making an HTTP request, there are a few common HTTP errors that may occur. These include:

  • 400 Bad Request
  • 401 Unauthorized
  • 403 Forbidden
  • 404 Not Found
  • 500 Internal Server Error

To handle these errors in Python Requests, we can use the raise_for_status() method. This method will raise an HTTPError if the response status code is not within the 200-299 range. Here's an example:


import requests

response = requests.get("https://www.example.com/api")

try:
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as err:
    print(err)
  

Timeouts

Timeouts can occur when a server takes too long to respond to a request. To handle timeouts in Python Requests, we can pass in a timeout parameter to the request method. Here's an example:


import requests

try:
    response = requests.get("https://www.example.com/api", timeout=5)
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as err:
    print(err)
  

In this example, we set the timeout to 5 seconds. If the server does not respond within that time frame, a Timeout exception will be raised.

Connection Errors

Connection errors can occur if there is a problem with the network connection. To handle connection errors in Python Requests, we can catch the ConnectionError exception. Here's an example:


import requests

try:
    response = requests.get("https://www.example.com/api")
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as err:
    print(err)
  

Conclusion

Handling exceptions in Python Requests is important to ensure that our code is able to handle and recover from errors that may occur during the request process. By using the appropriate exception handling techniques, we can write more robust and reliable code.