Python Requests

Python Requests is a popular HTTP library for sending HTTP/1.1 requests in Python. It provides a simple, human-friendly interface for performing tasks like sending GET or POST requests, handling cookies, headers, timeouts, and sessions. It's widely used in web scraping, API integration, and automation tasks.

Also known as: Requests library, requests module

Comparisons

  • Requests vs. urllib: requests offers a more intuitive and readable API compared to Python’s built-in urllib library.
  • Requests vs. HTTP clients like Axios: While Axios is used in JavaScript, Requests is the Python counterpart known for similar ease of use.

Pros

  • User-friendly: Clean and simple syntax for sending HTTP requests.
  • Feature-rich: Supports sessions, cookies, SSL verification, file uploads, and more.
  • Robust: Handles most common HTTP needs with less boilerplate code.

Cons

  • Limited to HTTP/1.1: Doesn’t support newer protocols like HTTP/2 out of the box
  • Blocking: Requests are synchronous, which can be limiting for high-performance applications.

Example

A Python script that uses requests to fetch and print the HTML content of a web page:

import requests


response = requests.get('https://example.com')
if response.status_code == 200:
    print(response.text)

This simple example shows how Requests makes it easy to interact with web content using just a few lines of code.


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