Overview of the Requests Library

requests is a prominent library in Python used to handle HTTP requests and responses. It is utilized for web scraping, API (Application Programming Interface) requests, and managing various web requests and responses.

Note: API refers to an interface defining the communication protocols between a server and client.

1. Simple to use: A straightforward API makes the handling of HTTP requests and responses easy.

2. Support for various HTTP methods: Offers support for different HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.

3. Convenient response handling: Enables simple handling of response data such as status codes, text, and JSON through response objects.

To request data from a webpage or an API, a GET request is sent using the requests.get() function.

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import requests

# Send a GET request to a webpage and receive a response
response = requests.get('https://example.com')
print(response.text)  # Output the HTML received in response

When sending data to a server or requesting certain operations, a POST request is sent using the requests.post() function.

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# Send a POST request to the server
payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
response = requests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data=payload)

res = response.text  # Save the response into the res variable
print(res)

• response.status_code: Returns the HTTP status code (e.g., 200, 404).

• response.headers: Returns the response headers as a dictionary.

• response.json(): Converts the JSON response to a Python object.

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