Python Requests Library: Installation, Basic Usage, and Advanced Scenarios

Introduction Requests is a simple yet powerful Python HTTP library that supports Python 2.7 and Python 3+, making HTTP requests easy and readable.

Installation pip install requests Basic request methods Requests provides convenient functions for the common HTTP verbs:

GET: requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get') POST: requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post') PUT: requests.put('http://httpbin.org/put') DELETE: requests.delete('http://httpbin.org/delete') HEAD: requests.head('http://httpbin.org/get') OPTIONS: requests.options('http://httpbin.org/get') GET without parameters

import requests
response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
print(response.text)

GET with query parameters

import requests
response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get?name=tom&age=25')
print(response.text)

GET using the params argument

import requests
data = {'name': 'tom', 'age': 25}
response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get', params=data)
print(response.text)

Parsing JSON responses

import requests, json
response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
print(type(response.text))
print(response.json())
print(json.loads(response.text))
print(type(response.json()))

Downloading binary data

import requests
response = requests.get('https://www.baidu.com/favicon.ico')
print(type(response.text), type(response.content))
print(response.text)
print(response.content)

Custom headers

import requests
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.159 Safari/537.36'}
response = requests.get('https://www.qq.com/', headers=headers)
print(response.text)

POST requests (form data)

import requests
data = {'name': 'tom', 'age': '25'}
response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', data=data)
print(response.text)

POST requests (JSON payload)

import requests
data = {'name': 'tom', 'age': '25'}
response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', json=data)
print(response.text)

Response attributes

import requests
response = requests.get('http://www.qq.com')
print(type(response.status_code), response.status_code)
print(type(response.headers), response.headers)
print(type(response.cookies), response.cookies)
print(type(response.url), response.url)
print(type(response.history), response.history)

Common HTTP status codes A comprehensive list of status‑code constants (e.g., 200 OK, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error) is shown for reference.

Advanced scenarios

File upload:

import requests
files = {'file': open('vite.png', 'rb')}
response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files=files)
print(response.text)

Retrieving cookies:

import requests
response = requests.get('https://www.zhihu.com')
print(response.cookies)
for key, value in response.cookies.items():
    print(key + '=' + value)

Session persistence / simulated login:

import requests
r = requests.get('http://www.baidu.com')
print(r.cookies['BDORZ'])
print(tuple(r.cookies))

SSL verification bypass:

import requests
from requests.packages import urllib3
urllib3.disable_warnings()
response = requests.get('https://www.12306.cn', verify=False)
print(response.status_code)

Proxy configuration:

import requests
proxies = {'http': 'http://127.0.0.1:8888', 'https': 'https://127.0.0.1:6666'}
response = requests.get('https://www.baidu.com', proxies=proxies)
print(response.status_code)

Timeout handling:

import requests
from requests.exceptions import ReadTimeout
try:
    response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get', timeout=0.005)
    print(response.status_code)
except ReadTimeout:
    print('timeout')

Basic authentication:

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
response = requests.get('https://passport.baidu.com/v2/api/?login', auth=HTTPBasicAuth('user', '123'))
print(response.status_code)

Small case study – maintaining a session

import random, time, datetime, requests

def make_request(session, body):
    resp = session.post('https://accounts.douban.com/j/mobile/login/basic', json=body)
    print(resp.text)

def main():
    session = requests.Session()
    start = time.time()
    for _ in range(100):
        make_request(session, {'admin': '123456'})
    end = time.time()
    print(f'发送100次请求，耗时：{end - start}')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

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