Skip to content

requests

52,128 30 248 Apache-2.0
2.32.3 (29 May 2024) Feb 14 2011 589.4 million (month)

The requests package is a popular library for making HTTP requests in Python. It provides a simple, easy-to-use API for sending HTTP/1.1 requests, and it abstracts away many of the low-level details of working with HTTP. One of the key features of requests is its simple API. You can send a GET request with a single line of code:

import requests
response = requests.get('https://webscraping.fyi/lib/requests/')
requests makes it easy to send data along with your requests, including JSON data and files. It also automatically handles redirects and cookies, and it can handle both basic and digest authentication. Additionally, it's also providing powerful functionality for handling exceptions, managing timeouts and session, also handling a wide range of well-known content-encoding types. One thing to keep in mind is that requests is a synchronous library, which means that your program will block (stop execution) while waiting for a response. In some situations, this may not be desirable, and you may want to use an asynchronous library like httpx or aiohttp. You can install requests package via pip package manager:
pip install requests
requests is a very popular library and has a large and active community, which means that there are many third-party libraries that build on top of it, and it has a wide range of usage.

Highlights


syncease-of-useno-http2no-asyncpopular

Example Use


import requests

# get request:
response = requests.get("http://webscraping.fyi/")
response.status_code
200
response.text
"text"
response.content
b"bytes"

# requests can automatically convert json responses to Python dictionaries:
response = requests.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"})

# Session object can be used to automatically keep track of cookies and set defaults:
from requests import Session
s = Session()
s.headers = {"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"}
s.get('http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/foo/bar')
print(s.cookies['foo'])
'bar'
print(s.get('http://httpbin.org/cookies').json())
{'cookies': {'foo': 'bar'}}

Alternatives / Similar


15,096 3.10.10 (16 days ago) Jul 26 2019 compare
13,195 0.27.2 (2 months ago) Jul 26 2019 compare
3,751 v0.6.1 (7 months ago) Feb 23 2022 compare
1,079 7.45.3 (8 months ago) Feb 25 2003 compare
1,751 0.7.1 (3 months ago) Feb 23 2022 compare
587 23.11.0 (11 months ago) Dec 28 2012 compare
672 0.8.2 (6 months ago) Feb 23 2022 compare

Other Languages

8,773 3.3.2 (10 months ago) Dec 28 2012 compare
105,641 1.7.7 (a month ago) Aug 29 2014 compare
got
14,222 14.4.2 (2 months ago) Mar 27 2014 compare
16,586 10.1.1 (5 days ago) Aug 22 2011 compare
1,624 3.3.1 (10 months ago) Dec 11 2011 compare
5,748 2.12.0 (a month ago) Dec 19 2009 compare
702 2.8.3 (7 years ago) Jul 25 2009 compare
1,158 1.0.0 (3 days ago) Oct 31 2009 compare
5,807 0.22.0 (5 months ago) Jul 25 2009 compare
4,079 1.4.1 (11 months ago) Oct 06 2009 compare
988 1.4.7 (1 year, 5 months ago) May 06 2012 compare
1,494 1.0.4 (2 years ago) Nov 22 2014 compare
23,055 7.9.1 (3 months ago) Nov 14 2011 compare
1,219 1.1.7 (4 years ago) Oct 25 2009 compare
383 18.1.0 (2 months ago) Aug 06 2011 compare
1,933 v7.1.5 (a month ago) Apr 28 2019 compare
894 1.0.1 (3 months ago) Sep 25 2013 compare
req
4,266 v3.48.0 (13 days ago) Aug 11 2023 compare
10,052 v2.15.3 (a month ago) Mar 13 2019 compare
507 1.1.4 (4 years ago) Apr 20 2010 compare
106 1.5.0 (6 months ago) Nov 09 2016 compare
3,571 v2.0.12 (3 months ago) Oct 06 2013 compare
1,918 1.3.0 (a month ago) Nov 11 2011 compare
1,743 1.0.0 (5 months ago) Apr 14 2012 compare
3,007 0.12.0 (7 years ago) Mar 20 2015 compare
156 2.2.4 (3 years ago) Dec 22 2019 compare
Was this page helpful?