python requests header

Python Requests Header

Introduction

When making HTTP requests using Python, the requests library is a popular choice. It provides a simple and convenient way to interact with websites and web services. One important aspect of sending requests is the ability to modify and customize the headers. In this article, we will explore how to use headers with requests library in Python.

What are Headers?

Headers are additional pieces of information sent along with an HTTP request or response. These headers provide important metadata about the request or response, such as the content type, user agent, authentication credentials, and more. Headers are key-value pairs, where the key represents the name of the header and the value represents the corresponding data.

Using Headers with Requests

The requests library in Python allows us to specify custom headers when sending an HTTP request. We can pass headers as a dictionary to the headers parameter of the request functions provided by the library. Let's see an example:

import requests

url = '
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer your_token_here'
}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

In the above example, we create a dictionary headers containing various headers like User-Agent, Content-Type, and Authorization. We then pass this dictionary as the headers parameter to the requests.get() function. This will ensure that the request is sent with the specified headers.

Commonly Used Headers

There are several commonly used headers that can be set while making requests. Some of them are:

• User-Agent: This header specifies the user agent string to identify the client making the request. It is useful for websites to know the type of client accessing their resources.
• Content-Type: This header specifies the media type of the resource being sent or requested. It is used to indicate the format of the request or response body.
• Authorization: This header is used for authentication purposes. It typically contains authentication credentials such as a token or username and password.
• Accept: This header specifies the content types that are acceptable in the response. It is used to tell the server what type of response the client is expecting.
• Referer: This header specifies the URL of the page from which the request originated. It is useful for websites to track the source of the requests.

Overriding Default Headers

By default, requests library sets some headers automatically, such as the User-Agent header. However, we can override these default headers with our custom headers. Let's see an example:

import requests

url = '
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'My Custom User Agent',
    'Accept': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

In the above example, we override the default User-Agent header by providing our custom value. We also specify that we are expecting a JSON response by setting the Accept header to application/json.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned how to use headers with the requests library in Python. Headers play a crucial role in exchanging metadata between the client and server. They allow us to customize our requests and provide important information to the server. By understanding and utilizing headers effectively, we can build more robust and secure web applications.

Remember to check the documentation of the specific API or website you are working with to understand the required headers and their values. Happy coding!