Menu
Article Bugs

what is python urllib.request

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

What is Python urllib.request?

Python is a very popular programming language, and it is used in various fields such as machine learning, web development, data science, and more. One of the most important libraries in Python is the urllib library, which allows you to perform various HTTP requests such as GET, POST, HEAD, etc. One of the modules in this library is urllib.request, which is used to send HTTP requests to a server and retrieve the response.

How to use urllib.request?

Using urllib.request is very easy. First, you need to import the library using the following code:


import urllib.request

Once you have imported the library, you can send HTTP requests to a server using the following code:


response = urllib.request.urlopen('http://example.com/')
html = response.read()
print(html)

This code sends an HTTP GET request to the URL 'http://example.com/' and retrieves the HTML content of the page. The content is stored in the variable 'html', which we can print to the console.

Different ways to use urllib.request

There are various ways to use urllib.request. You can specify different HTTP methods such as GET, POST, HEAD, DELETE, etc. You can also specify headers, cookies, and query parameters. Here are some examples:

  • Using GET method with query parameters:

url = 'http://example.com/search?q=python'
response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
html = response.read()
print(html)
  • Using POST method with form data:

import urllib.parse

url = 'http://example.com/login'
data = urllib.parse.urlencode({'username': 'raj', 'password': '1234'}).encode('utf-8')
req = urllib.request.Request(url, data)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
html = response.read()
print(html)
  • Using headers:

url = 'http://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/537.3'}
req = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=headers)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
html = response.read()
print(html)
Share