POST method – Python requests

Requests library is one of the important aspects of Python for making HTTP requests to a specified URL. This article revolves around how one can make POST request to a specified URL using requests.post() method. Before checking out the POST method, let’s figure out what a POST request is – 

POST Http Method

POST is a request method supported by HTTP used by the World Wide Web. By design, the POST request method requests that a web server accepts the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. It is often used when uploading a file or when submitting a completed web form. 

How to make POST request through Python Requests

Python’s requests module provides in-built method called post() for making a POST request to a specified URI.
Syntax – 

requests.post(url, params={key: value}, args)

Example – 
Let’s try making a request to httpbin’s APIs for example purposes.  

Python3

import requests

# Making a POST request
r = requests.post('https://httpbin.org / post', data ={'key':'value'})

# check status code for response received
# success code - 200
print(r)

# print content of request
print(r.json())

save this file as request.py and through terminal run, 

python request.py

Output –

Advantages of using POST Method

• It is more secure than GET because user-entered information is never visible in the URL query string or in the server logs.
• There is a much larger limit on the amount of data that can be passed and one can send text data as well as binary data (uploading a file) using POST. 

Disadvantages of using the POST Method

• Since the data sent by the POST method is not visible in the URL, so it is not possible to bookmark the page with specific query.
• POST requests are never cached
• POST requests do not remain in the browser history.