Making Requests with requests
When you want to interact with web services or APIs in Python, the process typically involves sending requests over HTTP and handling the responses. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) let you access data and functionality provided by other applications or servers—everything from weather data to stock prices to social media posts. In real-world Python projects, you often use a library like requests to do this easily. However, understanding how HTTP requests work at a lower level will give you a much deeper insight into networking and what happens under the hood. By using the socket module, you can directly send HTTP requests and receive responses, which is a valuable skill for troubleshooting, custom integrations, or when higher-level libraries are not available.
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728import socket # Define the target host and port (HTTP defaults to port 80) host = "example.com" port = 80 # Create a socket object using IPv4 and TCP with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as s: # Connect to the server s.connect((host, port)) # Construct a simple HTTP GET request request = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: {}\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n".format(host) s.sendall(request.encode()) # Receive the response data response = b"" while True: data = s.recv(4096) if not data: break response += data # Decode the bytes to a string response_text = response.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore") # Print the first 500 characters of the response print(response_text[:500])
When you send an HTTP request using sockets, the server responds with a structured message. The response starts with a status line (such as HTTP/1.1 200 OK), followed by headers (like Content-Type, Content-Length, etc.), and then the response body (the actual data, such as HTML or JSON). To extract useful data from an API response, look for:
- The status code in the first line, which tells you if the request was successful (200), redirected (3xx), had a client error (4xx), or server error (5xx);
- Headers that describe the content and provide metadata, such as
Content-Type: application/jsonfor API responses; - The body of the response, which contains the data you requested—this might be HTML, plain text, or structured data like JSON.
When working with APIs, you usually care most about the body content. If the content is JSON, you can parse it with Python's built-in json module. Always check the status code and headers to make sure your request succeeded and to understand the format of the data you receive.
Tak for dine kommentarer!
Spørg AI
Spørg AI
Spørg om hvad som helst eller prøv et af de foreslåede spørgsmål for at starte vores chat
Fantastisk!
Completion rate forbedret til 9.09Making Requests with requests
Stryg for at vise menuen
When you want to interact with web services or APIs in Python, the process typically involves sending requests over HTTP and handling the responses. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) let you access data and functionality provided by other applications or servers—everything from weather data to stock prices to social media posts. In real-world Python projects, you often use a library like requests to do this easily. However, understanding how HTTP requests work at a lower level will give you a much deeper insight into networking and what happens under the hood. By using the socket module, you can directly send HTTP requests and receive responses, which is a valuable skill for troubleshooting, custom integrations, or when higher-level libraries are not available.
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728import socket # Define the target host and port (HTTP defaults to port 80) host = "example.com" port = 80 # Create a socket object using IPv4 and TCP with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as s: # Connect to the server s.connect((host, port)) # Construct a simple HTTP GET request request = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: {}\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n".format(host) s.sendall(request.encode()) # Receive the response data response = b"" while True: data = s.recv(4096) if not data: break response += data # Decode the bytes to a string response_text = response.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore") # Print the first 500 characters of the response print(response_text[:500])
When you send an HTTP request using sockets, the server responds with a structured message. The response starts with a status line (such as HTTP/1.1 200 OK), followed by headers (like Content-Type, Content-Length, etc.), and then the response body (the actual data, such as HTML or JSON). To extract useful data from an API response, look for:
- The status code in the first line, which tells you if the request was successful (200), redirected (3xx), had a client error (4xx), or server error (5xx);
- Headers that describe the content and provide metadata, such as
Content-Type: application/jsonfor API responses; - The body of the response, which contains the data you requested—this might be HTML, plain text, or structured data like JSON.
When working with APIs, you usually care most about the body content. If the content is JSON, you can parse it with Python's built-in json module. Always check the status code and headers to make sure your request succeeded and to understand the format of the data you receive.
Tak for dine kommentarer!
