Python Programming

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".

Back to our blog API, let’s say we want to find all posts by the author with ID 2. You can pass this in as an argument to the params parameter.

>>> parameter = {"author": 2}
>>> response = requests.get("http://localhost:5000/articles", params=parameter)
>>> print(len(response.json())) 
3
>>> print(response.json())
[{'author': 2, 'content': 'Ronald Reagon. ...
>>> print(response.url)
http://localhost:5000/articles?author=2

You can see that your argument is formatted inside the URL (last line). In fact, if you check your server logs, you will see that this was actually what is passed to your server. You can actually just encode your parameters in your URL directly, i.e. requests.get("http://localhost:5000/articles?author=2"). But it is better to do it the way we did above, as requests will automatically escape characters that are not allowed in a URL (say a quotation mark "). It’s more readable too.

>>> parameters = {"author": 2, "query": "future"}
>>> response = requests.get("http://localhost:5000/articles", params=parameters)
>>> print(len(response.json())) # Only 2 articles now instead of 3!
2
>>> print(response.json())
[{'author': 2, 'content': "Listen, this is very important, ...
>>> print(response.url)
http://localhost:5000/articles?author=2&query=future