Python Requests Module: What it is and How to use it

What is Python Request?

Python Requests is a module that allows you to deal with HTTP requests using Python. It is actually a simple API for making HTTP calls for sending and receiving data from the provided URL using various request methods.

There is already a built-in urllib library in Python that does the same job but the ‘request module’ is better and it simplifies the process of working with HTTP requests in Python by providing a higher-level interface.

With the requests module, you can send HTTP requests using Python and receive responses from servers. You can use requests to make all kinds of HTTP requests, including GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more.

On top of that, it also supports several other features, such as the ability to add HTTP headers, cookies, and other HTTP parameters to your requests. Learn Python Basics.

See an example:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://effbot.org')

print(response.text)

This will send a GET request to https://effbot.org and print the response from the server.

Different requests methods

There are various different request methods that a client can use when making a request to a server. Some of the most commons requests methods are:

GET	retrieves a representation of a resource
HEAD	retrieves the headers for a representation of a resource
POST	submits an entity to a resource, often causing a change in state or side effects on the server
PUT	replaces a representation of the target resource with the request payload
DELETE	deletes a representation of a resource
CONNECT	establishes a tunnel to the server identified by the target resource
OPTIONS	describes the communication options for the target resource
TRACE	performs a message loop-back test along the path to the target resource
PATCH	applies partial modifications to a resource

How to install requests and use them?

First, you need to have Python installed on your local system. Once you have python and by default pip installed in your system, you can use the code below to get the requests module.

pip install requests

This will download the requests package from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and install it on your system.

To use requests in your Python code, you will need to import it using the following import statement:

import requests

Then, you can use the various functions provided by the requests module to make HTTP requests. For example, to send a GET request to a website, you can use the ‘requests.get()’ function as shown in the first code snippet above.

This will send a GET request to the website and store the response in a Response object. You can then access various properties of the response, such as the response body, headers, and status code, using the attributes of the Response object.