python requests module headers

Python requests module headers

When making HTTP requests in Python, the requests module provides a convenient interface to interact with APIs and websites. It allows us to send HTTP/1.1 requests easily, which supports GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more. Headers help us to provide additional information to the server about the request we are making.

How to pass headers using requests module?

We can pass headers to requests using the headers parameter in the requests functions like get(), post(), etc. The headers parameter should be a dictionary containing the header names and their values.


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/537.36'
}

response = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/get', headers=headers)

print(response.json())

The above code sends a GET request to https://httpbin.org/get with a User-Agent header set to a specific value. The response.json() method returns the response content in JSON format.

Commonly used headers in requests module

  • User-Agent: This header is used to identify the client software initiating the request to the server.
  • Authorization: This header is used to send authentication credentials to the server. For example, when accessing an API that requires authentication.
  • Cookie: This header is used to send cookies along with the request.
  • Content-Type: This header is used to indicate the media type of the resource being sent to or requested from the server. For example, application/json for JSON data.

Headers can be used to provide various information to the server and authenticate the client. It is important to use the correct headers when making requests to ensure proper communication between the client and server.