What is requests used for in Python?

Requests is an HTTP library for Python-based programs. It is one of the most downloaded Python packages. It provides a nice API for making HTTP requests.

Requests is popular because it is very simple to use compared to HTTP libraries like urllib and urllib2 .

You can use it to make GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, PATCH requests. It also supports HTTP Basic/Digest Authentication, Cookies, Redirects, and more.

While being the most popular by far, Requests is lacking some modern feature that other HTTP libraries like https have like Async and HTTP/2 support.

You can find more details in our comparison of Requests and other Python HTTP clients .

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