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The requests Package

Prerequisite: Computer Networks and APIs

The requests package provides an easy way for Python programs to issue HTTP requests, whether scraping the contents of a web page, or exchanging data with an API.

Reference: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/.

Installation

First install the package, if necessary:

pip install requests

Usage

Issuing HTTP Requests

Issue a "GET" request (perhaps the most common):

import requests

request_url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prof-rossetti/georgetown-opim-243-201901/master/data/products/1.json"
response = requests.get(request_url)
print(response.status_code)
print(response.text)

NOTE: if you are looking for more example URLs to request data from, head on over to the Web Requests Exercise.

In addition to "GET" requests, you can also issue other types of requests like "POST", "PUT", and "DELETE", sending data to the server as necessary:

# where request_url is a URL that accepts POST requests
# ... and my_data is a dictionary of data to POST
response = requests.post(request_url, json=my_data)

# where request_url is a URL that accepts PUT requests
# ... and my_data is a dictionary of data to PUT
response = requests.put(request_url, json=my_data)

# where request_url is a URL that accepts DELETE requests
response = requests.delete(request_url)

NOTE: if you are looking to try out these other kinds of requests, head on over to the API Client Exercise, which links to documentation for the "Products API", which provides example URLs you can use.

Parsing HTTP Responses

If the response contains JSON, you can use the json module to parse it:

response = requests.get(some_url)
response_data = json.loads(response.text)
print(type(response_data)) #> <class 'list'> or <class 'dict'>

If the response contains data in CSV format, you can use the familiar CSV-processing mechanisms like the the csv module or the pandas package, with some possible modifications for parsing a CSV-formatted string instead of a CSV file.

If the response contains data in HTML or XML format, you can use the BeautifulSoup package to parse it.