Python: HTTP POST Using Library “requests”

from urllib.parse import urlencode
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen

url = 'http://httpbin.org/post' # Set destination URL here
post_fields = {'foo': 'bar'}     # Set POST fields here

request = Request(url, urlencode(post_fields).encode())
json = urlopen(request).read().decode()
print(json)

# output

# {
#   "args": {},
#   "data": "",
#   "files": {},
#   "form": {
#     "foo": "bar"
#   },
#   "headers": {
#     "Accept-Encoding": "identity",
#     "Connection": "close",
#     "Content-Length": "7",
#     "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
#     "Host": "httpbin.org",
#     "User-Agent": "Python-urllib/3.6"
#   },
#   "json": null,
#   "origin": "172.10.232.224",
#   "url": "http://httpbin.org/post"
# }

Using Package Requests

Requests is a easy-to-use HTTP library, for Python.

“Requests” home page at

Python's standard urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you need, but the API is thoroughly broken. It was built for a different time — and a different web. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks.

install the package.

Here's a sample code using “requests”:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# python 2

import requests

r = requests.get('https://api.github.com', auth=('user', 'pass'))

print r.status_code
print r.headers['content-type']

# ------
# 200
# 'application/json'

Here's a sample code using standard Python lib “urllib2”.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import urllib2

gh_url = 'https://api.github.com'

req = urllib2.Request(gh_url)

password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, gh_url, 'user', 'pass')

auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager)

urllib2.install_opener(opener)

handler = urllib2.urlopen(req)

print handler.getcode()
print handler.headers.getheader('content-type')

# ------------------------------
# output

# 200
# 'application/json'