Python requests GET method

In this article, you will learn about Python requests GET method.

The GET is one of the most common HTTP methods and used to request data from a specified resource. Python provides several HTTP libraries to handle GET and POST requests, like -

• httplib
• urllib
• requests

Python requests module

In this article, we are using the Python requests module.

The requests module makes a HTTP request to the specified web page using Python and returns a response object. The installation process of this package is similar to the other Python packages. We can either download this from GitHub or install it using pip tool.

$ pip install requests

Python get() method

Python requests module provides get() method to return data of the requested URL. It has the following syntax -

requests.get(url, params={key: value}) 

Here, url is the url of the request and required parameter. The params is optional parameter. Some of the optional parameters are auth, cert, cookies, headers, timeout, verify, etc.

Suppose we want to get HTML content of a website, the code will be as follows -

import requests

URL = 'https://www.google.com'
page = requests.get(URL)
print(page.content)

The above code returns the HTML content of the requested web page.

Get HTTP Status Code

The requests get method has 'status_code' attribute to get the current status code of the URL. The following code returns the status code of the specified url -

import requests

URL = 'https://www.google.com'
page = requests.get(URL)
print(page.status_code)

The above code returns the following output -

(env) c:\python37\Scripts\projects>webscrap.py
{'Roll': 1001, 'address': {'city': 'New York', 'postal code': '10021', 'state': 'NY', 'street address': '11 1nd Street'}, 'class': 10, 'firstname': 'Priska', 'lastname': 'Kashyap', 'section': 'A'}

Get HTTP Headers

The HTTP Headers make the client and server pass the additional information with a HTTP request and response. It consists of its case-insensitive name followed by a colon(:) and then by its value.

import requests

r = requests.get('https://www.google.com')
print(r.headers)

The above code returns output something like this -

HTTP Authentication

We can use the Authentication header to pass credentials to the server. This can be possible with the auth parameter of the get method.

import requests

url = 'https://www.etutorialspoint.com/authpage.php'

x = requests.get(url, auth = ('username', 'password'))

print(x.status_code)

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