response.headers – 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.headers

out of a response object.

response.headers

returns a dictionary of response headers. To check more about headers, visit –

Different HTTP Headers

How to use response.headers using Python requests?

To illustrate use of response.headers, 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 –

Python3

# import requests module
import requests

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

# print response
print(response)

# print headers of response
print(response.headers)

Example Implementation –

Save above file as

request.py

and run using

Python request.py

Output –

Check that

headers

at the start of the output, it shows the different headers. Headers are used for different purposes such as Authentication/ Passing and retrieving data from the server, etc.

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.

response.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.