Python's Requests module

Requests library or module is one of python’s most widely used libraries for making HTTP requests. It provides an intuitive API that supports all major HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, without the need to manually handle low-level networking details.

Syntax:

requests.methodname(params)

Core features:

Below are some of the core capabilities of Requests:

• Simplifies HTTP requests with functions like get(), post(), put(), delete(), patch()
• Provides clean and simple management of headers, parameters and cookies
• Supports sessions, timeouts, error handling and authentication
• Built-in JSON parsing

Example of using requests:

• Simple get and posts requests: Here’s an example of a get request that returns data of a country and another example of post request that takes whatever payload you send and returns it back in the response. ```python import requests

  GET request:

  get_response = requests.get(“https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/malaysia”) country = get_response.json()[0]

  print(f”Country: {country[“name”][“common”]}”) print(f”Capital: {country[“capital”][0]}”)

  POST request

  payload = { “name”: “User”, “email”: “user@example.com” }

  post_response = requests.post(“https://httpbin.org/post”, json=payload) print(f”status code: {post_response.status_code}”) print(f”response: {post_response.json()}”)

- **Handling headers, query params and errors:**
```python
  headers = {
    "Accept": "application/vnd.github+json"
  }
  
  params = {
    "q": "python",
    "sort": "stars",
    "order": "desc"
  }
  
  try:
    response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/search/repositories", headers=headers, params=params)
    data = response.json()
  
    top_repo = data["items"][0]
    print("Name:", top_repo["full_name"])
    print("Stars:", top_repo["stargazers_count"])
    print("URL:", top_repo["html_url"])
    
  except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
    print("Request timed out. The server took too long to response.")
  except requests.exceptions.JSONDecoderError:
    print("Response returned but could not be decoded as JSON.")
  except Exception as e:
    print("An unexpected error occured: {e}")