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python requests post header authorization bearer

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

Python Requests Post Header Authorization Bearer

If you are working with APIs in Python, you may come across the need to use the Authorization header with the Bearer token. The Requests library in Python makes it easy to send HTTP/1.1 requests using Python. In this article, I will explain how to use the Requests library to send a POST request with the Authorization header using the Bearer token.

The Code


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/'
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN'}
data = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}

response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=data)
print(response.json())

The code above is pretty straightforward. First, we import the Requests library. Then we define our API endpoint URL and the headers with the Authorization key and your Bearer token. Finally, we define our data (if any) and send the POST request using the requests.post() method with the URL, headers, and data parameters.

Explanation of Code

The requests.post() method is used to send a POST request to a specified URL. The first parameter is the URL of the API endpoint. The second parameter is the headers dictionary which contains the authorization token. The third parameter is optional and contains any data that needs to be sent with the request. In the example above, we are sending a dictionary of key-value pairs as data.

The response.json() method is used to parse the response from the API endpoint as JSON. This method returns the response as a Python dictionary, which can be easily manipulated in your code.

Alternative Methods

There are other ways to send a POST request with the Authorization header using the Bearer token in Python, but using the Requests library is the most straightforward. Another popular library for sending HTTP requests in Python is the urllib library. Here's an example of how to use the urllib library to send a POST request with the Authorization header using the Bearer token:


import urllib.request
import json

url = 'https://api.example.com/'
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN'}
data = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
data = json.dumps(data).encode('utf-8')

req = urllib.request.Request(url=url, data=data, headers=headers, method='POST')
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
print(response.read())

In the code above, we first import the urllib library, which is included in Python's standard library. We define our URL, headers, and data variables. We then convert our data dictionary to a JSON string using the json.dumps() method, and encode it in UTF-8 format. We then create a Request object with the URL, data, headers, and method parameters. Finally, we use the urllib.request.urlopen() method to send the request and get the response. We print the response using the response.read() method.

Conclusion

In summary, using the Requests library is the simplest and most widely used method for sending HTTP/1.1 requests with Python. The library offers a wide range of features and makes it easy to send requests with different types of headers, parameters, and data. Using the Authorization header with a Bearer token is a common use case when working with APIs, and using the Requests library makes it easy to do so.

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