10 Practical Python Examples for JSON Handling and the Requests Module

JSON data format and the Requests library are essential tools in modern programming; this guide provides ten hands‑on examples to illustrate their usage.

1️⃣ Create and parse JSON data

import json
# Create JSON data
data = {
    "name": "John",
    "age": 30,
    "city": "New York"
}
json_data = json.dumps(data)  # Convert Python object to JSON string
print(json_data)  # Output: {"name": "John", "age": 30, "city": "New York"}

# Parse JSON data
json_string = '{"name": "Jane", "age": 28, "city": "San Francisco"}'
parsed_data = json.loads(json_string)  # Convert JSON string to Python dict
print(parsed_data)  # Output: {'name': 'Jane', 'age': 28, 'city': 'San Francisco'}

2️⃣ Send a GET request

import requests
response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')
print(response.status_code)  # e.g., 200
print(response.json())  # JSON response body
# Save the full response
with open('github_response.json', 'w') as f:
    json.dump(response.json(), f)

3️⃣ Send a GET request with parameters

params = {'q': 'Python requests', 'sort': 'stars'}
response = requests.get('https://api.github.com/search/repositories', params=params)
repos = response.json()['items']
for repo in repos[:5]:  # Print first 5 results
    print(repo['full_name'])

4️⃣ Send a POST request

payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', json=payload, headers=headers)
print(response.json())

5️⃣ Set a timeout

requests.get('http://example.com', timeout=5)  # Timeout after 5 seconds

6️⃣ Handle cookies

# Save cookies
response = requests.get('http://example.com')
cookies = response.cookies
# Send request with saved cookies
requests.get('http://example.com', cookies=cookies)

7️⃣ Customize HTTP headers

headers = {'User-Agent': 'My-Custom-UA'}
response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/headers', headers=headers)
print(response.text)

8️⃣ Download a file

url = 'https://example.com/image.jpg'
response = requests.get(url)
with open('image.jpg', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.content)

9️⃣ Handle authentication

from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
response = requests.get('https://example.com/api', auth=HTTPBasicAuth('username', 'password'))

🔟 Implement a retry mechanism

from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from requests.packages.urllib3.util.retry import Retry
retry_strategy = Retry(
    total=3,
    status_forcelist=[429, 500, 502, 503, 504],
    backoff_factor=1,
)
adapter = HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retry_strategy)
session = requests.Session()
session.mount('http://', adapter)
session.mount('https://', adapter)
response = session.get('https://example.com')

By working through these ten examples, readers gain a solid understanding of JSON manipulation and HTTP interactions with the Requests library, which can greatly improve productivity in web development and API integration tasks.