Menu
Article Troubleshooting

python requests headers user agent

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests Headers User Agent

When making web requests with Python's requests library, it is important to set the appropriate headers so that the server can identify the client making the request. One such header is the User-Agent header.

What is User-Agent Header?

The User-Agent header is a string that tells the server about the client making the request. It typically includes information such as the name and version of the client's operating system, web browser, etc. This information can be useful for server-side analysis and debugging.

Setting User-Agent Header in Python Requests

Python's requests library provides an easy way to set custom headers for a request using the headers parameter of the request methods like get(), post(), etc.

import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'
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'
}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

In this example, we are setting the User-Agent header to mimic a Google Chrome browser running on Windows 10. You can replace this value with any other valid User-Agent string.

Other Ways to Set User-Agent Header

  • You can set the User-Agent header globally for all requests by modifying the headers attribute of the Session object.
  • You can use a User-Agent switching library like fake-useragent to automatically generate random User-Agent strings for each request.
Share