aiohttpvshttr
aiohttp is an asynchronous HTTP client/server framework for asyncio and Python. It provides a simple API for making HTTP requests and handling both client and server functionality. Like the requests package, aiohttp is designed to be easy to use and handle many of the low-level details of working with HTTP.
The main benefit of aiohttp over requests is that it is built on top of the asyncio library, which means that it can handle many requests at the same time without blocking the execution of your program. This can lead to significant performance improvements when making many small requests, or when dealing with slow or unreliable network connections.
aiohttp provides both client and server side functionality, so you can use it to create web servers and handle client requests in a non-blocking manner. It also supports WebSocket protocol, so it can be used for building real-time application like chat, game, etc.
aiohttp also provide several features for handling connection errors, managing timeouts, and client sessions. It also provide similar features like requests package like redirect handling, cookies, and support for several authentication modules.
You can install aiohttp via pip package manager:
pip install aiohttp
In terms of API design, aiohttp is similar to requests and thus should be familiar to anyone who has used the requests library, but it provides an async with block to manage the context of the connection and used await statement to wait for the result.
It''s worth noting that aiohttp is built on top of asyncio and is designed to be used in Python 3.5 and above. It provides the same functionality as httpx but it is specifically built for the asyncio framework.
The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for the curl package, customised to the demands of modern web APIs.
Key features:
- Functions for the most important http verbs: GET(), HEAD(), PATCH(), PUT(), DELETE() and POST().
- Automatic connection sharing across requests to the same website (by default, curl handles are managed automatically), cookies are maintained across requests, and a up-to-date root-level SSL certificate store is used.
- Requests return a standard reponse object that captures the http status line, headers and body, along with other useful information.
- Response content is available with content() as a raw vector (as = "raw"), a character vector (as = "text"), or parsed into an R object (as = "parsed"), currently for html, xml, json, png and jpeg.
- You can convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status().
- Config functions make it easier to modify the request in common ways: set_cookies(), add_headers(), authenticate(), use_proxy(), verbose(), timeout(), content_type(), accept(), progress().
- Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 with oauth1.0_token() and oauth2.0_token(). The demo directory has eight OAuth demos: four for 1.0 (twitter, vimeo, withings and yahoo) and four for 2.0 (facebook, github, google, linkedin). OAuth credentials are automatically cached within a project.
Highlights
Example Use
import asyncio
from aiohttp import ClientSession, WSMsgType
# aiohttp only provides async client so we must use a coroutine:
async def run():
async with ClientSession(headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"}) as session:
# we can use the session to make requests:
response = await session.get("http://httpbin.org/headers")
print(response.status)
# note: to read the response body we must use await:
print(await response.text())
# aiohttp also comes with convenience methods for common requests:
# POST json
resp = await session.post("http://httpbin.org/post", json={"key": "value"})
# POST form data
resp = await session.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data={"key": "value"})
# decode response as json
resp = await session.get("http://httpbin.org/json")
data = await resp.json()
print(data)
# aiohttp also supports websocket connections
# which can be used to scrape websites that use websockets:
async with session.ws_connect("http://example.org/ws") as ws:
async for msg in ws:
if msg.type == WSMsgType.TEXT:
if msg.data == "close cmd":
await ws.close()
break
else:
await ws.send_str(msg.data + "/answer")
elif msg.type == WSMsgType.ERROR:
break
asyncio.run(run())
library(httr)
# GET requests:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/get")
status_code(resp) # status code
headers(resp) # headers
str(content(resp)) # body
# POST requests:
# Form encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "form")
# Multipart encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "multipart")
# JSON encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "json")
# setting cookies:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/cookies", set_cookies("MeWant" = "cookies"))
content(r)$cookies # get response cookies