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requests/docs/user/quickstart.rst
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.. _quickstart:
Quickstart
==========
.. module:: requests.models
Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started
with Requests. This assumes you already have Requests installed. If you do not,
head over to the :ref:`Installation <install>` section.
First, make sure that:
* Requests is :ref:`installed <install>`
* Requests is :ref:`up-to-date <updates>`
Lets gets started with some simple use cases and examples.
Make a GET Request
------------------
Making a standard request with Requests is very simple.
Let's get GitHub's public timeline ::
r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
Now, we have a :class:`Response` object called ``r``. We can get all the
information we need from this.
Response Content
----------------
We can read the content of the server's response::
>>> r.content
'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...
Response Status Codes
---------------------
We can check the response status code::
>>> r.status_code
200
Requests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy
reference::
>>> r.status_code == requests.codes.ok
True
If we made a bad request, we can raise it with
:class:`Response.raise_for_status()`::
>>> _r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> _r.status_code
404
>>> _r.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "requests/models.py", line 394, in raise_for_status
raise self.error
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: NOT FOUND
But, since our ``status_code`` was ``200``, when we call it::
>>> r.raise_for_status()
None
All is well.
Response Headers
----------------
We can view the server's response headers with a simple Python dictionary
interface::
>>> r.headers
{
'status': '200 OK',
'content-encoding': 'gzip',
'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
'connection': 'close',
'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
'x-runtime': '148ms',
'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
'content-type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
}
The dictionary is special, though: it's made just for HTTP headers. According to
`RFC 2616 <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html>`_, HTTP
Headers are case-insensitive.
So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want::
>>> r.headers['Content-Type']
'application/json; charset=utf-8'
>>> r.headers.get('content-type')
'application/json; charset=utf-8'
If a header doesn't exist in the Response, its value defaults to ``None``::
>>> r.headers['X-Random']
None
Cookies
-------
If a response contains some Cookies, you can get quick access to them::
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/requests-is/awesome'
>>> r = requests.get(url)
>>> print r.cookies
{'requests-is': 'awesome'}
The underlying CookieJar is also available for more advanced handling::
>>> r.request.cookiejar
<cookielib.CookieJar>
To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the ``cookies``
parameter::
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')
>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cookies)
>>> r.content
'{"cookies": {"cookies_are": "working"}}'