.. module:: requests.models
Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started with Requests.
First, make sure that:
- Requests is :ref:`installed <install>`
- Requests is :ref:`up-to-date <updates>`
Let's get started with some simple examples.
Making a request with Requests is very simple.
Begin by importing the Requests module:
>>> import requests
Now, let's try to get a webpage. For this example, let's get GitHub's public timeline
>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events')
Now, we have a :class:`Response <requests.Response>` object called r. We can
get all the information we need from this object.
Requests' simple API means that all forms of HTTP request are as obvious. For example, this is how you make an HTTP POST request:
>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post")
Nice, right? What about the other HTTP request types: PUT, DELETE, HEAD and OPTIONS? These are all just as simple:
>>> r = requests.put("http://httpbin.org/put")
>>> r = requests.delete("http://httpbin.org/delete")
>>> r = requests.head("http://httpbin.org/get")
>>> r = requests.options("http://httpbin.org/get")
That's all well and good, but it's also only the start of what Requests can do.
You often want to send some sort of data in the URL's query string. If
you were constructing the URL by hand, this data would be given as key/value
pairs in the URL after a question mark, e.g. httpbin.org/get?key=val.
Requests allows you to provide these arguments as a dictionary, using the
params keyword argument. As an example, if you wanted to pass
key1=value1 and key2=value2 to httpbin.org/get, you would use the
following code:
>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = requests.get("http://httpbin.org/get", params=payload)
You can see that the URL has been correctly encoded by printing the URL:
>>> print(r.url) http://httpbin.org/get?key2=value2&key1=value1
Note that any dictionary key whose value is None will not be added to the
URL's query string.
We can read the content of the server's response. Consider the GitHub timeline again:
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
>>> r.text
u'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...
Requests will automatically decode content from the server. Most unicode charsets are seamlessly decoded.
When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the encoding of
the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Requests
is used when you access r.text. You can find out what encoding Requests is
using, and change it, using the r.encoding property:
>>> r.encoding 'utf-8' >>> r.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'
If you change the encoding, Requests will use the new value of r.encoding
whenever you call r.text. You might want to do this in any situation where
you can apply special logic to work out what the encoding of the content will
be. For example, HTTP and XML have the ability to specify their encoding in
their body. In situations like this, you should use r.content to find the
encoding, and then set r.encoding. This will let you use r.text with
the correct encoding.
Requests will also use custom encodings in the event that you need them. If
you have created your own encoding and registered it with the codecs
module, you can simply use the codec name as the value of r.encoding and
Requests will handle the decoding for you.
You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:
>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...
The gzip and deflate transfer-encodings are automatically decoded for you.
For example, to create an image from binary data returned by a request, you can use the following code:
>>> from PIL import Image >>> from StringIO import StringIO >>> i = Image.open(StringIO(r.content))
There's also a builtin JSON decoder, in case you're dealing with JSON data:
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
>>> r.json()
[{u'repository': {u'open_issues': 0, u'url': 'https://github.com/...
In case the JSON decoding fails, r.json raises an exception. For example, if
the response gets a 401 (Unauthorized), attempting r.json raises ValueError:
No JSON object could be decoded
In the rare case that you'd like to get the raw socket response from the
server, you can access r.raw. If you want to do this, make sure you set
stream=True in your initial request. Once you do, you can do this:
>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json', stream=True)
>>> r.raw
<requests.packages.urllib3.response.HTTPResponse object at 0x101194810>
>>> r.raw.read(10)
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03'
In general, however, you should use a pattern like this to save what is being streamed to a file:
with open(filename, 'wb') as fd:
for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size):
fd.write(chunk)
Using Response.iter_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise
have to handle when using Response.raw directly. When streaming a
download, the above is the preferred and recommended way to retrieve the
content.
If you'd like to add HTTP headers to a request, simply pass in a dict to the
headers parameter.
For example, we didn't specify our content-type in the previous example:
>>> import json
>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}
>>> headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}
>>> r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)
Typically, you want to send some form-encoded data — much like an HTML form.
To do this, simply pass a dictionary to the data argument. Your
dictionary of data will automatically be form-encoded when the request is made:
>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data=payload)
>>> print(r.text)
{
...
"form": {
"key2": "value2",
"key1": "value1"
},
...
}
There are many times that you want to send data that is not form-encoded. If
you pass in a string instead of a dict, that data will be posted directly.
For example, the GitHub API v3 accepts JSON-Encoded POST/PATCH data:
>>> import json
>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}
>>> r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))
Requests makes it simple to upload Multipart-encoded files:
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': open('report.xls', 'rb')}
>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
...
"files": {
"file": "<censored...binary...data>"
},
...
}
You can set the filename, content_type and headers explicitly:
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post' >>> files = {'file': ('report.xls', open('report.xls', 'rb'), 'application/vnd.ms-excel', {'Expires': '0'})}>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files) >>> r.text { ... "files": { "file": "<censored...binary...data>" }, ... }
If you want, you can send strings to be received as files:
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': ('report.csv', 'some,data,to,send\nanother,row,to,send\n')}
>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
...
"files": {
"file": "some,data,to,send\\nanother,row,to,send\\n"
},
...
}
In the event you are posting a very large file as a multipart/form-data
request, you may want to stream the request. By default, requests does not
support this, but there is a separate package which does -
requests-toolbelt. You should read the toolbelt's documentation for more details about how to use it.
For sending multiple files in one request refer to the :ref:`advanced <advanced>` section.
We can check the response status code:
>>> r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r.status_code
200
Requests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy reference:
>>> r.status_code == requests.codes.ok True
If we made a bad request (a 4XX client error or 5XX server error response), we can raise it with :meth:`Response.raise_for_status() <requests.Response.raise_for_status>`:
>>> bad_r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> bad_r.status_code
404
>>> bad_r.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "requests/models.py", line 832, in raise_for_status
raise http_error
requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 Client Error
But, since our status_code for r was 200, when we call
raise_for_status() we get:
>>> r.raise_for_status() None
All is well.
We can view the server's response headers using a Python dictionary:
>>> r.headers
{
'content-encoding': 'gzip',
'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
'connection': 'close',
'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
'x-runtime': '148ms',
'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
'content-type': 'application/json'
}
The dictionary is special, though: it's made just for HTTP headers. According to RFC 7230, HTTP Header names are case-insensitive.
So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want:
>>> r.headers['Content-Type']
'application/json'
>>> r.headers.get('content-type')
'application/json'
If a response contains some Cookies, you can quickly access them:
>>> url = 'http://example.com/some/cookie/setting/url' >>> r = requests.get(url) >>> r.cookies['example_cookie_name'] 'example_cookie_value'
To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the cookies
parameter:
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')
>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cookies)
>>> r.text
'{"cookies": {"cookies_are": "working"}}'
By default Requests will perform location redirection for all verbs except HEAD.
We can use the history property of the Response object to track redirection.
The :meth:`Response.history <requests.Response.history>` list contains the :class:`Request <requests.Request>` objects that were created in order to complete the request. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent request.
For example, GitHub redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS:
>>> r = requests.get('http://github.com')
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]
If you're using GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE, you can disable
redirection handling with the allow_redirects parameter:
>>> r = requests.get('http://github.com', allow_redirects=False)
>>> r.status_code
301
>>> r.history
[]
If you're using HEAD, you can enable redirection as well:
>>> r = requests.head('http://github.com', allow_redirects=True)
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]
You can tell Requests to stop waiting for a response after a given number of
seconds with the timeout parameter:
>>> requests.get('http://github.com', timeout=0.001)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
requests.exceptions.Timeout: HTTPConnectionPool(host='github.com', port=80): Request timed out. (timeout=0.001)
Note
timeout is not a time limit on the entire response download;
rather, an exception is raised if the server has not issued a
response for timeout seconds (more precisely, if no bytes have been
received on the underlying socket for timeout seconds).
In the event of a network problem (e.g. DNS failure, refused connection, etc), Requests will raise a :class:`~requests.exceptions.ConnectionError` exception.
In the rare event of an invalid HTTP response, Requests will raise an :class:`~requests.exceptions.HTTPError` exception.
If a request times out, a :class:`~requests.exceptions.Timeout` exception is raised.
If a request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections, a :class:`~requests.exceptions.TooManyRedirects` exception is raised.
All exceptions that Requests explicitly raises inherit from :class:`requests.exceptions.RequestException`.
Ready for more? Check out the :ref:`advanced <advanced>` section.