urllib vs requests: Which Python Library Wins for Web Scraping?

Introduction

When using Python for web crawling, you need to simulate HTTP requests; the most common libraries are the built‑in urllib and the third‑party requests, with requests generally recommended because it wraps urllib for easier use.

urllib library

Overview

The urllib response object is created by first building an HTTP request object and passing it to urllib.request.urlopen, which returns an HTTP response whose .read().decode() yields a Unicode string.

from urllib import request
# request headers
headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36"
}
wd = {"wd": "中国"}
url = "http://www.baidu.com/s?"
req = request.Request(url, headers=headers)
response = request.urlopen(req)
print(type(response))
print(response)
res = response.read().decode()
print(type(res))
print(res)

Running the code returns an HTML page (see image).

Note: When constructing HTTP requests for crawling, you often need to add extra headers such as User‑Agent, cookies, or proxy settings to bypass anti‑scraping mechanisms.

requests library

Overview

The requests library uses requests.get (or post) to send a request and returns a Response object; .text gives Unicode content, .content returns raw bytes, and .json() parses JSON.

Use .text for textual data and .content for binary files such as images.

Advantages of requests

For web crawling, requests is preferred because it can directly construct and send GET/POST requests, whereas urllib.request requires separate steps to build the request before sending.

import requests

headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 8.1.0; zh-cn; BLA-AL00 Build/HUAWEIBLA-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/57.0.2987.132 MQQBrowser/8.9 Mobile Safari/537.36"
}
wd = {"wd": "中国"}
url = "http://www.baidu.com/s?"
response = requests.get(url, params=wd, headers=headers)
data = response.text
data2 = response.content
print(response)
print(type(response))
print(data)
print(type(data))
print(data2)
print(type(data2))
print(data2.decode())
print(type(data2.decode()))

The output shows the full HTML page (see image).

Conclusion

The article compares urllib and requests based on basic Python knowledge.

Using urllib.request requires manual construction of request headers and decoding of the response. requests is a higher‑level wrapper of urllib, making it more convenient for most crawling tasks.

Web scraping is a practical skill; trying it hands‑on helps overcome many real‑world challenges.

Collaboration and shared learning are encouraged.