APIs and Requests

Introduction

The requests library allows making HTTP calls to interact with web APIs.

GET Requests

import requests

# Simple GET
response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/data")

# With parameters
params = {"page": 1, "limit": 10}
response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/users", params=params)

# With headers
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer token123"}
response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/protected", headers=headers)

Working with Response

response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/data")

print(response.status_code)   # 200
print(response.headers)      # Response headers
print(response.text)         # Raw text
print(response.json())       # Parse JSON

# Check success
if response.ok:
    data = response.json()

POST and Other Methods

# POST with JSON
data = {"name": "Alice", "email": "alice@email.com"}
response = requests.post("https://api.example.com/users", json=data)

# PUT
response = requests.put("https://api.example.com/users/1", json=data)

# DELETE
response = requests.delete("https://api.example.com/users/1")

Practice Problems

1. Fetch weather data from OpenWeatherMap
2. Search GitHub API for repositories
3. POST new record to mock API
4. Handle authentication with tokens
5. Rate limiting and retries