httpxvshttr
httpx is a fully featured HTTP client for Python 3, which provides sync and async APIs, and support for both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. It is designed to be a replacement for the popular requests package, with the added benefit of being fully compatible with Python 3's async features.
One of the main features of httpx is its support for asynchronous programming. This means that it can send multiple requests at the same time, without blocking the execution of your program. This can lead to significant performance improvements, especially when working with many small requests, or when dealing with slow or unreliable network connections.
httpx also supports sending HTTP/2 requests, which allows for more efficient use of network resources and can result in faster page loads.
One of the strengths of httpx is the possibility of working on streaming mode for the response data. This means you can process the response as it comes in, instead of waiting for the entire response to be received. This is useful when working with large files, or when you need to process the data in real-time.
Additionally, httpx provides a number of other features that are common in modern HTTP clients, such as support for sending and receiving cookies, handling redirects, and working with multipart file uploads. It also include support for several well-known authentication modules like BasicAuth, DigestAuth, and BearerAuth.
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 httpx
# Just like requests httpx can be used directly
response = httpx.get("http://webscraping.fyi/")
response.status_code
200
response.text
"text"
response.content
b"bytes"
# HTTP2 needs to be enabled explicitly and is recommended for web scraping:
response = httpx.get("http://webscraping.fyi/", http2=True)
# httpx can automatically convert json responses to Python dictionaries:
response = httpx.get("http://httpbin.org/json")
print(response.json())
{'slideshow': {'author': 'Yours Truly', 'date': 'date of publication', 'slides': [{'title': 'Wake up to WonderWidgets!', 'type': 'all'}, {'items': ['Why <em>WonderWidgets</em> are great', 'Who <em>buys</em> WonderWidgets'], 'title': 'Overview', 'type': 'all'}], 'title': 'Sample Slide Show'}}
# for POST request it can ingest Python's dictionaries as JSON:
response = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", json={"query": "hello world"})
# or form data:
response = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data={"query": "hello world"})
# persistent client can be established using Client object
# this allows to set default values and automatically track cookies
from httpx import Client
c = Client(headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"}, http2=True)
c.get('http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/foo/bar')
print(c.cookies['foo'])
'bar'
print(c.get('http://httpbin.org/cookies').json())
{'cookies': {'foo': 'bar'}}
# for asynchronous requests AsyncClient must be used:
import asyncio
from httpx import AsyncClient
async def example_use():
async with AsyncClient(headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"}) as client:
response = await client.get("http://httpbing.org/get")
# to schedule multiple requests concurrently use asyncio gather or as_completed
three_concurrent_responses = await asyncio.gather(
client.get("http://httpbing.org/get"),
client.get("http://httpbing.org/get"),
client.get("http://httpbing.org/get"),
)
asyncio.run(example_use())
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