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python requests stream

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests Stream

Python Requests is a popular library that simplifies HTTP requests in Python. The library provides a lot of functionalities to handle HTTP requests and responses, including sending and receiving data in streaming mode.

Using Requests Stream

To use the streaming functionality of Requests, we can use the stream parameter of the requests.get() method. If we set this parameter to True, we will receive the response incrementally, instead of waiting for the complete response.


        import requests
        
        response = requests.get('https://example.com', stream=True)
        for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
            if chunk:
                # do something with the chunk
                pass

In the above example, we are making a GET request to 'https://example.com' with the stream=True parameter. Then, we are iterating over the content of the response in chunks of 1024 bytes using the iter_content() method. We can process each chunk as it is received, instead of waiting for the complete response.

Other Ways to Use Requests Stream

Apart from using the stream parameter, we can also use other methods provided by the Requests library to handle streaming data. These methods include:

  • response.raw: This attribute returns the raw socket response from the server. We can read the content of the response in chunks using the response.raw.read(chunk_size) method.
  • response.iter_lines(chunk_size=512, decode_unicode=False): This method returns an iterator over the lines of the response. We can specify the chunk size and whether to decode the lines as Unicode.
  • response.iter_content(chunk_size=1, decode_unicode=False): This method returns an iterator over the content of the response. We can specify the chunk size and whether to decode the content as Unicode.

Depending on our use case, we can choose the method that suits us best.

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