Requests

By: Prijesh Dholaria, Zahabiya Rangwala,

Komal Kishore Dave, Oluwatoyin Alabede,
Ronald Munoz
 Introduction to Requests in Python

Requests - HTTP library for Python that allows to easily make HTTP requests to get information from
websites.

A request is made up of – Endpoint, Method, Data and Header

To use requests library, use import requests

Example: r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events')

Here,

r is the response object.

Requests in python support all HTTP methods

1. Get -> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/get')

2. Post -> r = requests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data={'key': 'value'})
3. Put -> r = requests.put('https://httpbin.org/put', data={'key': 'value'})
4. Delete -> r = requests.delete('https://httpbin.org/delete')

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 Response Content
A response is received from the API after a request has been made. It will
have a header and response data. The response header consists of useful
metadata about the response, while the response data returns what was
requested.

Example: r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events') with r as the

response object.

When you print r

print(r) >>>Response<200>

When this code example prints the response object to the console, it
returns the name of the object’s class and the status code the request
returned.

You can also print

response.content() which returns the the raw bytes of the data payload

response.text() Returns a string representation of the data payload

response.json() API returns JSON.

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 Binary/ JSON/ RAW Response Content
Binary data - unit can take on only
two possible states, as 0 and 1.
Response body can also be
accessed as bytes, for non-text
requests:
>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"u
rl":"https://github.com/...
Eg: Create an image from binary
data returned by a request:
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> i =
Image.open(BytesIO(r.content))
Requests have built in JSON
decoder
It’s used for transmitting data in
web applications (e.g., sending
some data from the server to
the client, so it can be displayed
on a web page, or vice versa
Eg: >>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get
('https://api.github.com/events')
>>> r.json()
[{'repository': {'open_issues': 0,
'url': 'https://github.com/...
To get raw socket response from
server, you can access the
response with r.raw as one of
the functions to get raw content.
Response.raw is a raw stream of
bytes - it does not transform the
response content
>>> r = requests.get
('https://api.github.com/events',
stream=True) >>> r.raw
<urllib3.response.HTTPResponse
object at 0x101194810> >>>
r.raw.read(10) 4
 More Complicated POST Requests
>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1',
Send form-encoded data like an HTML form. 'key2': 'value2'}

Pass a dictionary to the data argument and dictionary of data will >>> r =
automatically be form-encoded requests.post("https://httpbin.or
The data argument can also have multiple values for each key. This can
g/post", data=payload)
be done by making data by either of the following: >>> print(r.text)
--------------------------------------
1. List of tuples payload_tuples = [('key1', 'value1'), ('key1', 'value2')] {
2. Dictionary with lists as values payload_dict = {'key1': ['value1', ...
'value2']} "form": {
"key2": "value2",
If non encoded data has to be auto encoded -> use JSON parameter "key1": "value1"
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'} },
...
>>> r = requests.post(url, json=payload) }
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 Response Headers and status codes

Response Header: This type of headers contains Snippet

the location of the source that has been
requested by the client or about the server >>> r.headers
providing the information. {
'content-encoding': 'gzip',
They can be viewed using Python dictionary 'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
'connection': 'close',
>>> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/get') 'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
'x-runtime': '148ms',
>>> r.status_code 'etag':
200 '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
'content-type': 'application/json'
If we made a bad request (a 4XX client error or }
5XX server error response)

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 Cookies

Cookies are created in every website you visit to identify you.

They also speed up some authentication parts of the website by saving

your information for that website.

One can access the cookies from a website using requests.

Cookies can be returned in a dictionary format from RequestsCookieJar.

Which allows for more complete interface, suitable for multiple domains.

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Errors and Exceptions

In the event of a network problem (e.g. DNS failure, refused connection, etc) -> Requests raises
a ConnectionError exception.

HTTP request returned an unsuccessful status code -> Response.raise_for_status() raises an

HTTPError.

Request time out -> Timeout exception is raised.

Request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections -> TooManyRedirects

exception is raised.

All exceptions that Requests explicitly raises inherit from

requests.exceptions.RequestException

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THANK YOU