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Python by Example: HTTP Client

Fetching URLs is common—APIs, web scraping, downloads. The built-in urllib.request works without extra packages. Use urlopen() to get a response; read the body with .read(). For simpler APIs, the requests library is popular—it handles encoding, JSON, and sessions with less code.

What you'll learn:

  • Using urllib.request.urlopen()
  • Reading the response body
from urllib.request import urlopen

# Fetch a URL (example uses a simple public API)
with urlopen("https://httpbin.org/get") as response:
    body = response.read().decode()
    print(body[:200] + "...")

urlopen returns a file-like object. .read() gives bytes; .decode() converts to a string. The with block ensures the connection is closed.

To run this program:

$ python source/http-client.py
{"args": {}, "headers": {"Accept-Encoding": "identity", ...

Tip: For JSON responses, use json.loads(response.read().decode()). With requests, it's response.json().

Try it: Fetch a different URL (e.g., https://example.com) and print the first 500 characters.

Source: http-client.py

Next: HTTP Server