Python Requests Library: Core Modules, Methods, Parameters, and Usage Examples

The requests library consists of core modules: requests for sending HTTP requests, requests.Session for managing sessions, requests.Response for handling responses, and requests.exceptions for handling exceptions.

It provides methods for various HTTP requests: .get(), .post(), .put(), .delete(), .head(), .options().

Key parameters include url, params, data, json, headers, cookies, auth, and timeout.

Example of a GET request:

import requests
url = "https://api.example.com/users"
params = {"page": 1, "limit": 10}
response = requests.get(url, params=params)
print(response.status_code)
print(response.json())

Example of a POST request:

import requests
url = "https://api.example.com/users"
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
data = {"username": "testuser", "password": "testpass"}
response = requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers)
print(response.status_code)
print(response.json())

Example of a PUT request:

import requests
url = "https://api.example.com/users/123"
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
data = {"username": "testuser", "email": "[email protected]"}
response = requests.put(url, json=data, headers=headers)
print(response.status_code)
print(response.json())

Example of a DELETE request:

import requests
url = "https://api.example.com/users/123"
response = requests.delete(url)
print(response.status_code)
print(response.json())

Using Session to persist parameters across requests:

import requests
session = requests.Session()
session.headers.update({"Content-Type": "application/json"})
response1 = session.get("https://api.example.com/users")
response2 = session.post("https://api.example.com/users", json={"username": "testuser"})
print(response1.status_code)
print(response2.status_code)

Exception handling for requests:

import requests
from requests.exceptions import HTTPError, Timeout, RequestException
try:
    response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/users", timeout=5)
    response.raise_for_status()
except HTTPError as http_err:
    print(f"HTTP error: {http_err}")
except Timeout:
    print("Request timeout")
except RequestException as err:
    print(f"Request error: {err}")
else:
    print("Request successful")
    print(response.json())

In summary, requests is a powerful HTTP client library suitable for API automation testing. Mastering its components and invocation methods enables easy sending of various HTTP requests and handling of response data.