POST method – Python requests

Last Updated : 22 Sep, 2021

Requests library is one of the important aspects of Python for making HTTP requests to a specified URL. This article revolves around how one can make POST request to a specified URL using requests.post() method. Before checking out the POST method, let’s figure out what a POST request is –

POST Http Method

POST is a request method supported by HTTP used by the World Wide Web. By design, the POST request method requests that a web server accepts the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. It is often used when uploading a file or when submitting a completed web form.

How to make POST request through Python Requests

Python’s requests module provides in-built method called post() for making a POST request to a specified URI.
Syntax –

requests.post(url, params={key: value}, args)

Example –
Let’s try making a request to httpbin’s APIs for example purposes.

Python3

import requests
 
# Making a POST request
r = requests.post('https://httpbin.org / post', data ={'key':'value'})
 
# check status code for response received
# success code - 200
print(r)
 
# print content of request
print(r.json())

save this file as request.py and through terminal run,

python request.py

Output –

post-method-python-requests

Advantages of using POST Method

It is more secure than GET because user-entered information is never visible in the URL query string or in the server logs.
There is a much larger limit on the amount of data that can be passed and one can send text data as well as binary data (uploading a file) using POST.

Disadvantages of using the POST Method

Since the data sent by the POST method is not visible in the URL, so it is not possible to bookmark the page with specific query.
POST requests are never cached
POST requests do not remain in the browser history.

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