You want to learn how to use that fancy HTTP protocol client thingy in Python?
To kick things off let’s install the `requests` library (because who wants to do anything manually when there are libraries available?!). Open your terminal or command prompt and type:
# This script installs the `requests` library using the `pip3` command.
# The `pip3` command is used to install Python packages and libraries.
# The `install` command is used to install a specific package or library.
# The `requests` library is a Python library used for making HTTP requests.
# The `pip3 install requests` command will install the `requests` library on the local machine.
# To run this script, open the terminal or command prompt and type `bash script.sh` or `./script.sh` if the script has executable permissions.
Now that we have our trusty sidekick, let’s get started!
To make a simple GET request (which is what you do most of the time), all you need to do is import `requests`, create an object with your URL, and call its `get()` method. Here’s some code that gets the content from Google’s homepage:
# Import the requests library to make HTTP requests
import requests
# Define the URL we want to make a GET request to
url = 'https://www.google.com/'
# Use the requests library to make a GET request to the specified URL
response = requests.get(url)
# Print the content of the response, which is the HTML code of Google's homepage
print(response.content)
That’s it! You can now print out the HTML code for Google’s homepage (which is not very exciting, but hey you asked for a tutorial).
Let’s say you want to pass some parameters in your GET request. For example, let’s get the results of a search query on Google:
# Import the requests library to make HTTP requests
import requests
# Define the URL for the Google search page
url = 'https://www.google.com/search'
# Define the parameters to be passed in the GET request
params = {'q': 'Python tutorial', 'hl': 'en'}
# Send a GET request to the specified URL with the given parameters
response = requests.get(url, params=params)
# Print the content of the response, which is the HTML code for the Google search results page
print(response.content)
In this example, we added a dictionary called `params` that contains the search query and language preference. The `params` argument is passed to the `requests.get()` method as a keyword argument.
Now POST requests (which are used for sending data to servers). To make a simple POST request, you need to create some JSON data that will be sent in the body of your request:
# Import the necessary libraries
import json # Import the json library to handle json data
import requests # Import the requests library to make HTTP requests
# Define the URL to send the POST request to
url = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts'
# Create a dictionary with the data to be sent in the request body
data = {'title': 'Python tutorial', 'body': 'Learn Python with ease! ', 'userId': 1}
# Use the requests library to make a POST request to the specified URL
# The data is converted to json format using the json.dumps() method
response = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(data))
# Print the content of the response
print(response.content)
In this example, we created a dictionary called `data` that contains the title, body, and user ID for our new blog post. We then converted it to JSON using the `json.dumps()` method (which is necessary because Python sends data in JSON format). The resulting string is passed as the `data` argument of the `requests.post()` method.
And that’s all there is to it! You can now use HTTP protocol client in Python 3 with ease, and impress your friends by showing them how to send requests like a pro.