Python Requests Response Content
response.content – Python requests – GeeksforGeeks
Python requests are generally used to fetch the content from a particular resource URI. Whenever we make a request to a specified URI through Python, it returns a response object. Now, this response object would be used to access certain features such as content, headers, etc. This article revolves around how to check the ntent out of a response object. ntent returns the content of the response, in bytes. Basically, it refers to Binary Response content. How to use ntent using Python requests? To illustrate use of ntent, let’s ping API of Github. To run this script, you need to have Python and requests installed on your PC. Prerequisites –Download and Install Python 3 Latest VersionHow to install requests in Python – For windows, linux, macExample code – Example Implementation –Save above file as and run using Python Output –Check that b’ at the start of output, it means the reference to a bytes object. Advanced ConceptsThere are many libraries to make an HTTP request in Python, which are lib, urllib, lib2, treq, etc., but requests is the one of the best with cool features. If any attribute of requests shows NULL, check the status code using below attribute. atus_codeIf status_code doesn’t lie in range of 200-29. You probably need to check method begin used for making a request + the url you are requesting for resources. Attention geek! Strengthen your foundations with the Python Programming Foundation Course and learn the basics. To begin with, your interview preparations Enhance your Data Structures concepts with the Python DS Course. And to begin with your Machine Learning Journey, join the Machine Learning – Basic Level Course
Python requests.Response Object – W3Schools
❮ Requests Module
Example
Make a request to a web page, and return the status code:
import requestsx = (”)print(atus_code)
Run Example »
Definition and Usage
The sponse() Object contains the server’s response to the HTTP request.
Properties and Methods
Property/Method
Description
apparent_encoding
Try it
Returns the apparent encoding
close()
Closes the connection to the server
content
Returns the content of the response, in bytes
cookies
Returns a CookieJar object with the cookies sent back from the server
elapsed
Returns a timedelta object with the time elapsed from sending the request to the arrival of the response
encoding
Returns the encoding used to decode
headers
Returns a dictionary of response headers
history
Returns a list of response objects holding the history of request (url)
is_permanent_redirect
Returns True if the response is the permanent redirected url, otherwise False
is_redirect
Returns True if the response was redirected, otherwise False
iter_content()
Iterates over the response
iter_lines()
Iterates over the lines of the response
json()
Returns a JSON object of the result (if the result was written in JSON format, if not it raises an error)
links
Returns the header links
next
Returns a PreparedRequest object for the next request in a redirection
ok
Returns True if status_code is less than 400, otherwise False
raise_for_status()
If an error occur, this method returns a HTTPError object
reason
Returns a text corresponding to the status code
request
Returns the request object that requested this response
status_code
Returns a number that indicates the status (200 is OK, 404 is Not Found)
text
Returns the content of the response, in unicode
url
Returns the URL of the response
❮ Requests Module
Quickstart – Python Requests
Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started
with Requests.
First, make sure that:
Requests is installed
Requests is up-to-date
Let’s get started with some simple examples.
Make a Request¶
Making a request with Requests is very simple.
Begin by importing the Requests module:
Now, let’s try to get a webpage. For this example, let’s get GitHub’s public
timeline:
>>> r = (”)
Now, we have a Response object called r. We can
get all the information we need from this object.
Requests’ simple API means that all forms of HTTP request are as obvious. For
example, this is how you make an HTTP POST request:
>>> r = (”, data = {‘key’:’value’})
Nice, right? What about the other HTTP request types: PUT, DELETE, HEAD and
OPTIONS? These are all just as simple:
>>> r = requests. options(”)
That’s all well and good, but it’s also only the start of what Requests can
do.
Passing Parameters In URLs¶
You often want to send some sort of data in the URL’s query string. If
you were constructing the URL by hand, this data would be given as key/value
pairs in the URL after a question mark, e. g.
Requests allows you to provide these arguments as a dictionary of strings,
using the params keyword argument. As an example, if you wanted to pass
key1=value1 and key2=value2 to, you would use the
following code:
>>> payload = {‘key1’: ‘value1’, ‘key2’: ‘value2’}
>>> r = (”, params=payload)
You can see that the URL has been correctly encoded by printing the URL:
>>> print()
Note that any dictionary key whose value is None will not be added to the
URL’s query string.
You can also pass a list of items as a value:
>>> payload = {‘key1’: ‘value1’, ‘key2’: [‘value2’, ‘value3’]}
Response Content¶
We can read the content of the server’s response. Consider the GitHub timeline
again:
>>> import requests
>>>
‘[{“repository”:{“open_issues”:0, “url”:”
Requests will automatically decode content from the server. Most unicode
charsets are seamlessly decoded.
When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the encoding of
the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Requests
is used when you access You can find out what encoding Requests is
using, and change it, using the r. encoding property:
>>> r. encoding
‘utf-8’
>>> r. encoding = ‘ISO-8859-1’
If you change the encoding, Requests will use the new value of r. encoding
whenever you call You might want to do this in any situation where
you can apply special logic to work out what the encoding of the content will
be. For example, HTML and XML have the ability to specify their encoding in
their body. In situations like this, you should use ntent to find the
encoding, and then set r. encoding. This will let you use with
the correct encoding.
Requests will also use custom encodings in the event that you need them. If
you have created your own encoding and registered it with the codecs
module, you can simply use the codec name as the value of r. encoding and
Requests will handle the decoding for you.
Binary Response Content¶
You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:
>>> ntent
b'[{“repository”:{“open_issues”:0, “url”:”
The gzip and deflate transfer-encodings are automatically decoded for you.
The br transfer-encoding is automatically decoded for you if a Brotli library
like brotli or brotlicffi is installed.
For example, to create an image from binary data returned by a request, you can
use the following code:
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> i = (BytesIO(ntent))
JSON Response Content¶
There’s also a builtin JSON decoder, in case you’re dealing with JSON data:
>>> ()
[{‘repository’: {‘open_issues’: 0, ‘url’: ‘
In case the JSON decoding fails, () raises an exception. For example, if
the response gets a 204 (No Content), or if the response contains invalid JSON,
attempting () raises requests. exceptions. JSONDecodeError. This wrapper exception
provides interoperability for multiple exceptions that may be thrown by different
python versions and json serialization libraries.
It should be noted that the success of the call to () does not
indicate the success of the response. Some servers may return a JSON object in a
failed response (e. g. error details with HTTP 500). Such JSON will be decoded
and returned. To check that a request is successful, use
r. raise_for_status() or check atus_code is what you expect.
Raw Response Content¶
In the rare case that you’d like to get the raw socket response from the
server, you can access If you want to do this, make sure you set
stream=True in your initial request. Once you do, you can do this:
>>> r = (”, stream=True)
>>> (10)
‘\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03’
In general, however, you should use a pattern like this to save what is being
streamed to a file:
with open(filename, ‘wb’) as fd:
for chunk in er_content(chunk_size=128):
(chunk)
Using er_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise
have to handle when using directly. When streaming a
download, the above is the preferred and recommended way to retrieve the
content. Note that chunk_size can be freely adjusted to a number that
may better fit your use cases.
Note
An important note about using er_content versus
er_content will automatically decode the gzip and deflate
transfer-encodings. is a raw stream of bytes – it does not
transform the response content. If you really need access to the bytes as they
were returned, use
More complicated POST requests¶
Typically, you want to send some form-encoded data — much like an HTML form.
To do this, simply pass a dictionary to the data argument. Your
dictionary of data will automatically be form-encoded when the request is made:
>>> r = (“, data=payload)
{…
“form”: {
“key2”: “value2”,
“key1”: “value1″},… }
The data argument can also have multiple values for each key. This can be
done by making data either a list of tuples or a dictionary with lists
as values. This is particularly useful when the form has multiple elements that
use the same key:
>>> payload_tuples = [(‘key1’, ‘value1’), (‘key1’, ‘value2’)]
>>> r1 = (”, data=payload_tuples)
>>> payload_dict = {‘key1’: [‘value1’, ‘value2’]}
>>> r2 = (”, data=payload_dict)
“key1”: [
“value1”,
“value2″]},… }
>>> ==
True
There are times that you may want to send data that is not form-encoded. If
you pass in a string instead of a dict, that data will be posted directly.
For example, the GitHub API v3 accepts JSON-Encoded POST/PATCH data:
>>> import json
>>> url = ”
>>> payload = {‘some’: ‘data’}
>>> r = (url, (payload))
Instead of encoding the dict yourself, you can also pass it directly using
the json parameter (added in version 2. 4. 2) and it will be encoded automatically:
>>> r = (url, json=payload)
Note, the json parameter is ignored if either data or files is passed.
Using the json parameter in the request will change the Content-Type in the header to application/json.
POST a Multipart-Encoded File¶
Requests makes it simple to upload Multipart-encoded files:
>>> files = {‘file’: open(”, ‘rb’)}
>>> r = (url, files=files)
“files”: {
“file”: “<>“},… }
You can set the filename, content_type and headers explicitly:
>>> files = {‘file’: (”, open(”, ‘rb’), ‘application/’, {‘Expires’: ‘0’})}
If you want, you can send strings to be received as files:
>>> files = {‘file’: (”, ‘some, data, to, send\nanother, row, to, send\n’)}
“file”: “some, data, to, send\\nanother, row, to, send\\n”},… }
In the event you are posting a very large file as a multipart/form-data
request, you may want to stream the request. By default, requests does not
support this, but there is a separate package which does –
requests-toolbelt. You should read the toolbelt’s documentation for more details about how to use it.
For sending multiple files in one request refer to the advanced
section.
Warning
It is strongly recommended that you open files in binary
mode. This is because Requests may attempt to provide
the Content-Length header for you, and if it does this value
will be set to the number of bytes in the file. Errors may occur
if you open the file in text mode.
Response Status Codes¶
We can check the response status code:
>>> atus_code
200
Requests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy
reference:
>>> atus_code ==
If we made a bad request (a 4XX client error or 5XX server error response), we
can raise it with
Response. raise_for_status():
>>> bad_r = (”)
404
>>> bad_r. raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “requests/”, line 832, in raise_for_status
raise _error
TPError: 404 Client Error
But, since our status_code for r was 200, when we call
raise_for_status() we get:
>>> r. raise_for_status()
None
All is well.
Cookies¶
If a response contains some Cookies, you can quickly access them:
>>> r = (url)
>>> okies[‘example_cookie_name’]
‘example_cookie_value’
To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the cookies
parameter:
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are=’working’)
>>> r = (url, cookies=cookies)
‘{“cookies”: {“cookies_are”: “working”}}’
Cookies are returned in a RequestsCookieJar,
which acts like a dict but also offers a more complete interface,
suitable for use over multiple domains or paths. Cookie jars can
also be passed in to requests:
>>> jar = questsCookieJar()
>>> (‘tasty_cookie’, ‘yum’, domain=”, path=’/cookies’)
>>> (‘gross_cookie’, ‘blech’, domain=”, path=’/elsewhere’)
>>> r = (url, cookies=jar)
‘{“cookies”: {“tasty_cookie”: “yum”}}’
Redirection and History¶
By default Requests will perform location redirection for all verbs except
HEAD.
We can use the history property of the Response object to track redirection.
The Response. history list contains the
Response objects that were created in order to
complete the request. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent
response.
For example, GitHub redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS:
”
>>> r. history
[
If you’re using GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE, you can disable
redirection handling with the allow_redirects parameter:
>>> r = (”, allow_redirects=False)
301
[]
If you’re using HEAD, you can enable redirection as well:
>>> r = (”, allow_redirects=True)
Timeouts¶
You can tell Requests to stop waiting for a response after a given number of
seconds with the timeout parameter. Nearly all production code should use
this parameter in nearly all requests. Failure to do so can cause your program
to hang indefinitely:
>>> (”, timeout=0. 001)
File “
requests. Timeout: HTTPConnectionPool(host=”, port=80): Request timed out. (timeout=0. 001)
timeout is not a time limit on the entire response download;
rather, an exception is raised if the server has not issued a
response for timeout seconds (more precisely, if no bytes have been
received on the underlying socket for timeout seconds). If no timeout is specified explicitly, requests do
not time out.
Errors and Exceptions¶
In the event of a network problem (e. DNS failure, refused connection, etc),
Requests will raise a ConnectionError exception.
Response. raise_for_status() will
raise an HTTPError if the HTTP request
returned an unsuccessful status code.
If a request times out, a Timeout exception is
raised.
If a request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections, a
TooManyRedirects exception is raised.
All exceptions that Requests explicitly raises inherit from
questException.
Ready for more? Check out the advanced section.
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Frequently Asked Questions about python requests response content
What is response content in Python?
Python requests are generally used to fetch the content from a particular resource URI. Whenever we make a request to a specified URI through Python, it returns a response object. Now, this response object would be used to access certain features such as content, headers, etc.Jul 26, 2021
How do you get a response from a Python request?
When one makes a request to a URI, it returns a response. This Response object in terms of python is returned by requests. method(), method being – get, post, put, etc. Response is a powerful object with lots of functions and attributes that assist in normalizing data or creating ideal portions of code.Jul 23, 2021
How do you make a request in Python?
Requests is one of the most popular Python libraries that is not included with Python. It has been proposed that Requests be distributed with Python by default. Requests is an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings.
