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Requests

The requests library allow you to send HTTP requests from a python program, which is the equivalent of typing a url into your browser's address bar and hitting 'enter'. You can then receive the data from the website and process it. You can read more in the official docs and w3schools.

Sending a GET Request

Sending a GET request is the direct equivalent of using your browser, you can get the body of the response using response.text.

import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org')
print(response.text) # 76.105.187.182

The Response Object

The response object has multiple properties for getting information about the HTTP response. Read more on w3schools.

import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org')
print(response.url)
print(response.text) # 76.105.187.182
print(response.status_code) # 200
print(response.encoding) # ISO-8859-1
print(response.headers) # {'Content-Type': 'text/plain', 'Content-Length': '14', ...}

Setting the Encoding

Depending on the type of response, you may need to set the encoding so the characters are properly interpreted.

import requests
response = requests.get('https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62897/62897-0.txt')
response.encoding = 'utf-8' # set encoding to utf-8
print(response.text)

Specifying Query Parameters

You can use the params keyword argument to specify query parameters, which is much cleaner than using string concatenation.

import requests

# cleaner
response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org', params={'format': 'json'})
print(response.url) # https://api.ipify.org/?format=json

# more messy, especially if you have many query parameters
response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org?format=json')

Specifying Custom Request Headers

Request headers contain metadata about the request, they can be used to specify an API key or custom user agent.

import requests
response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
print(response.text) # 76.105.187.182

Receiving JSON

If the response is in JSON, you can turn it into a python dictionary using the json.loads() function or the json() method on the response object. You can then extract the relevant data.

import requests
response = requests.get('https://api.ipify.org', params={'format': 'json'})
print(response.text) # {"ip":"76.105.187.182"} - raw json response
data = response.json() # turn raw json into a python dictionary
print(data) # {'ip': '76.105.187.182'} - python dictionary
print(data['ip']) # 76.105.187.182

import json
data = json.loads(response.text) # use the json library to parse the raw response
print(data) # {'ip': '76.105.187.182'} - python dictionary
print(data['ip']) # 76.105.187.182