What is http method in python?

The http or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol works on client server model. Usually the web browser is the client and the computer hosting the website is the server. IN python we use the requests module for creating the http requests. It is a very powerful module which can handle many aspects of http communication beyond the simple request and response data. It can handle authentication, compression/decompression, chunked requests etc.

An HTTP client sends an HTTP request to a server in the form of a request message which includes following format:

• A Request-line
• Zero or more header (General|Request|Entity) fields followed by CRLF
• An empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF) indicating the end of the header fields
• Optionally a message-body

The following sections explain each of the entities used in an HTTP request message.

Request-Line

The Request-Line begins with a method token, followed by the Request-URI and the protocol version, and ending with CRLF. The elements are separated by space SP characters.

Request-Line = Method SP Request-URI SP HTTP-Version CRLF

Let's discuss each of the parts mentioned in the Request-Line.

Request Method

The request method indicates the method to be performed on the resource identified by the given Request-URI. The method is case-sensitive and should always be mentioned in uppercase. The following table lists all the supported methods in HTTP/1.1.

Request-URI

The Request-URI is a Uniform Resource Identifier and identifies the resource upon which to apply the request. Following are the most commonly used forms to specify an URI:

Request-URI = "*" | absoluteURI | abs_path | authority

Using Python requests

We will use the module requests for learning about http request.

pip install requests 

In the below example we see a case of simple GET request annd print out the result of the response. We choose to print only the first 300 characters.

# How to make http request
import requests as req
r = req.get('http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/')
print(r.text)[0:300]

When we run the above program, we get the following output −