Python - HTTP Requests

The http or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol works on client server model. Usually the web browser is the client and the computer hosting the website is the 
server. IN python we use the requests module for creating the http requests. It is a very powerful module which can handle many aspects of http communication beyond the 
simple request and response data. It can handle authentication, compression/decompression, chunked requests etc. 
An HTTP client sends an HTTP request to a server in the form of a request message which includes following format:
A Request-line
Zero or more header (General|Request|Entity) fields followed by CRLF
An empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF) 
indicating the end of the header fields
Optionally a message-body
The following sections explain each of the entities used in an HTTP request message.
The Request-Line begins with a method token, followed by the Request-URI and the protocol version, and ending with CRLF. The elements are separated by space SP characters.
Request-Line = Method SP Request-URI SP HTTP-Version CRLF

Let's discuss each of the parts mentioned in the Request-Line.
The request method indicates the method to be performed on the resource identified by the given Request-URI. The method is case-sensitive and should always be mentioned in uppercase. The following table lists all the supported methods in HTTP/1.1.
The GET method is used to retrieve  information from the given server using a given URI.  Requests using GET should only retrieve data and should have no other effect on the data.
Same as GET, but it transfers the status line and the header section only.
A POST request is used to send data to the server, for example, customer information, file upload, etc. using HTML forms.
Replaces all the current representations of the target resource with the uploaded content.
Removes all the current representations of the target resource given by URI.
Establishes a tunnel to the server identified by a given URI.
Describe the communication options for the target resource.
Performs a message loop back test along with the path to the target resource.
The Request-URI is a Uniform Resource Identifier and identifies the resource upon which to apply the request. Following are the most commonly used forms to specify an URI:
Request-URI = "*" | absoluteURI | abs_path | authority

OPTIONS * HTTP/1.1
GET http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TheProject.html HTTP/1.1
GET /pub/WWW/TheProject.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.w3.org
Note that the absolute path cannot be empty; if none is present in the original URI, it MUST be given as "/" (the server root).
We will use the module requests for learning about http request.
pip install requests 
In the below example we see a case of simple GET request annd print out the result of the response. We choose to print only the first 300 characters.
# How to make http request
import requests as req
r = req.get('http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/')
print(r.text)[0:300]
When we run the above program, we get the following output −
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!--[if IE 8]><html class="ie ie8"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9]><html class="ie ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 9]><!-->	<html> <!--<![endif]-->
<head>
<!-- Basic -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Python Tutorial</title>
<meta name="description" content="Python Tutorial