Using Headers with the Python Requests Library’s “get” Method

In this article, we’ll explain how to use the Python Requests library’s “get” method to send HTTP requests with headers.

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What Are Headers?

In an HTTP request, a header contains information about the request or response. It consists of key-value pairs, each separated by a colon. Headers are often used to pass metadata in a request, such as authorization information and the user agent.

Sending HTTP Requests with the Python “requests” Library

The Python “requests” library is a convenient and powerful HTTP library that can be used to send HTTP requests and process HTTP responses. We can simply send a GET request using the get method of the requests library.

The following is a simple example showing how to send a GET request using the get method of the requests library:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com')
print(response.status_code)

The above code will send a GET request to https://www.example.com and print the response status code.

Sending HTTP Requests Using Headers

In some cases, you may need to add headers when sending an HTTP request. You can pass headers using the headers parameter of the get method of the requests library.

Here is an example showing how to send an HTTP request using headers:

import requests

headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3',

'Authorization': 'Bearer xxxxxxxx',
}

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)
print(response.status_code)

The above code passes two headers when sending a GET request: User-Agent and Authorization. The User-Agent header is used to simulate a browser and provide information about the user agent to the server. The Authorization header is used to pass authorization information in a request.

Setting Common Headers

There are many common headers that can be set when sending HTTP requests. Here are some examples of common headers:

• Accept: Specifies the content types accepted by the client, such as “text/plain” or “application/json”.
• Content-Type: Specifies the content type of the request or response, such as “text/plain” or “application/json”.
• User-Agent: Emulates the browser’s user agent, used to provide information about the client to the server.
• Authorization: Used to pass authorization information in a request, such as a Bearer token or Basic authentication.
• Cookie: Used to pass cookie information in a request, such as for authentication or tracking user sessions.
• Referer: Represents the source URL of the request, used to indicate which page linked to the current page.

We can use the headers parameter of the get method of the requests library to set these common headers.

Here is an example showing how to set common headers:

import requests

headers = {
'Accept': 'application/json',
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3',
'Authorization': 'Bearer xxxxxxxx',
'Cookie': 'sessionid=xxxxxxxxx',
'Referer': 'https://www.example.com',
}

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', headers=headers)
print(response.status_code)

The above code sets common headers and sends a GET request with those headers.

Summary

In this article, we introduced how to use the get method of the Python requests library to send HTTP requests with headers. We learned how to use the headers parameter of the requests library and demonstrated how to set common headers. By using headers, we can pass additional metadata when sending HTTP requests, which helps ensure proper interaction and communication with the server. Using Python’s requests library, handling HTTP requests with headers becomes simple and convenient.