response.encoding – Python requests

Python requests are generally used to fetch the content from a particular resource URI. Whenever we make a request to a specified URI through Python, it returns a response object. Now, this response object would be used to access certain features such as content, headers, etc. This article revolves around how to check the response.encoding out of a response object. response.encoding returns the encoding used to decode response.content. Check more about encoding here – Python Strings encode() method

How to use response.encoding using Python requests?

To illustrate use of response.encoding, let’s ping API of Github. To run this script, you need to have Python and requests installed on your PC.

Prerequisites –

• Download and Install Python 3 Latest Version
• How to install requests in Python – For windows, linux, mac

Example code –

# import requests module
import requests

# Making a get request
response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')

# print response
print(response)

# print encoding of response
print(response.encoding)

Example Implementation –

Save above file as request.py and run using

Python request.py

Output –

Check that utf-8 at the start of the output, it shows that string is encoded and decoded using “utf-8”.

Advanced Concepts

There are many libraries to make an HTTP request in Python, which are httplib, urllib, httplib2, treq, etc., but requests is the one of the best with cool features. If any attribute of requests shows NULL, check the status code using below attribute.

requests.status_code

If status_code doesn’t lie in range of 200-29. You probably need to check method begin used for making a request + the url you are requesting for resources.