Python Requests - Send HTTP POST

Python - Send HTTP POST Request

HTTP POST request is used to create or update a resource in a specified server.

In Python Requests library, requests.post() method is used to send a POST request to a server over HTTP. You can also send additional data in the POST request using data parameter.

Examples

1. Send HTTP POST Request

In this example, we shall send a POST request to the server with the given URL.

Python Program

import requests

response = requests.post('https://example.com/api/', data = {'key': 'value'})

Explanation:

  1. The requests.post() function sends an HTTP POST request to the provided URL with the specified data.
  2. The data parameter is a dictionary containing the key-value pairs you want to send to the server.
  3. Once the request is sent, a Response object is returned, containing the server's response, including the status code, headers, and content.

Let us print the headers received in the response to the POST request made in the above example.

Python Program

import requests

response = requests.post('https://example.com/api/', data={'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'})

print(response.headers)

Output

{'Date': 'Mon, 25 Mar 2019 11:16:23 GMT', 'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=UTF-8', 'Content-Length': '12136', 'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'Keep-Alive': 'timeout=30', 'Server': 'Apache/2', 'X-Powered-By': 'PHP/5.6.30', 'Link': '</wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/", </>; rel=shortlink', 'Vary': 'Accept-Encoding', 'Content-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Referrer-Policy': 'no-referrer-when-downgrade'}

2. Send POST Request with JSON Data

POST requests are often used to send data to the server in JSON format. To send JSON data, you need to set the Content-Type header to application/json and pass the data as JSON.

Python Program

import requests
import json

headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

data = {'name': 'John', 'age': 30}

response = requests.post('https://example.com/api/', headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))

print(response.json())

Explanation:

  1. Here, we send JSON data to the server by serializing the dictionary using json.dumps().
  2. The headers dictionary specifies that the content type is JSON (application/json).
  3. The server will process the request as JSON and return a JSON response, which we print using response.json().

Output

{'status': 'success', 'message': 'Data received'}

3. Handling POST Request with Files

Another use case of POST requests is to upload files to the server. We can send a file as part of the POST request using the files parameter.

Python Program

import requests

files = {'file': open('example.txt', 'rb')}

response = requests.post('https://example.com/upload', files=files)

print(response.status_code)

Explanation:

  1. The files parameter is used to send files in a POST request. We open the file in binary mode (rb) and pass it as a dictionary with the file key.
  2. The server processes the file and responds with a status code, which we print in the program.

Output

200

About HTTP POST Request

Following are some of the points to be noted while working with a POST request:

  • POST requests are never cached.
  • POST requests do not remain in the browser history.
  • POST requests cannot be bookmarked.
  • POST requests have no restrictions on data length.

Summary

In this tutorial, we learned how to send an HTTP POST request using the Python requests library. We also explored various use cases such as sending form data, JSON data, and uploading files in a POST request.



Python Libraries