Python Programming

GET with parameters

You can also make a GET request with some parameters. You might have sometimes seen this passed in a URL (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=python). This is essentially making a GET request with the key ‘q’ and value ‘python’.

Let’s say we want to find all posts by userId=1.

>>> query = {"userId": 1}
>>> response = requests.get("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts", params=query)
>>> print(response.json())

In our real Github REST API, we could for example search for repositories about requests in our favourite programming language python. The following should return 30 results.

>>> parameters = {"q": "requests+language:python"}
>>> response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/search/repositories", params=parameters)
>>> print(response.json().keys())  
## dict_keys(['total_count', 'incomplete_results', 'items'])

>>> print(len(response.json()["items"])) 
## 30

>>> print(response.url)
## https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=requests%2Blanguage%3Apython

You can also pass multiple parameters. For example, you might be building a search engine interface to Github, and you might want to also limit the number of results per page. Let’s say 10 for this example.

>>> parameters = {"q": "requests+language:python", "per_page": 10}
>>> response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/search/repositories", params=parameters)

>>> print(len(response.json()["items"])) 
## 10

>>> print(response.url)
## https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=requests%2Blanguage%3Apython&per_page=10

GET with timeout

Sometimes you might get stuck waiting forever for the server to respond. You counter this by including a timeout (in seconds) to your get request.

Here we abort the request if we do not receive a response within 1 second. The function will raise a TimeOut exception.

requests.get('https://api.github.com', timeout=1)