When working with APIs or fetching data from a website, making GET requests is a common task. In Python, the requests library provides a simple and intuitive way to send GET requests and handle the responses.

Installing requests library

Before we start making GET requests, we need to make sure that the requests library is installed. If you don’t have it already, you can install it by running the following command:

pip install requests

Making a basic GET request

To make a GET request using the requests library, you simply need to call the get() function and provide the URL of the resource you want to fetch. Here’s an example:

import requests

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

In the above code snippet, we import the requests library and then use the requests.get() function to make a GET request to the specified URL. The response from the server is stored in the response variable.

Handling the response

Once the GET request is made, you can access the data returned by the server using various properties and methods provided by the response object. Here are a few commonly used ones:

• response.status_code - Returns the status code of the HTTP response (e.g., 200 for success, 404 for not found).
• response.text - Returns the response content as a plain string.
• response.json() - Returns the response content as a JSON object.

For example, to print the status code and the response content, you can do the following:

import requests

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

print('Status code:', response.status_code)
print('Response content:', response.text)

Handling errors

In addition to handling successful responses, it’s also important to handle errors that may occur during the GET request. The requests library provides the raise_for_status() method, which raises an exception if the GET request was unsuccessful. Here’s an example:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/invalid-endpoint')
response.raise_for_status()

The raise_for_status() method will raise an exception if the GET request resulted in an error (e.g., 404 Not Found). You can then catch and handle the exception as needed.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned about the basic concepts and usage of making GET requests using the requests library in Python. We covered how to install the library, make a GET request, handle the response, and handle errors. With this basic knowledge, you can start fetching data from APIs and websites in your Python projects.