How do I read a response from Python Requests?

I have two Python scripts. One uses the Urllib2 library and one uses the Requests library.

I have found Requests easier to implement, but I can’t find an equivalent for urlib2’s read() function. For example:

...
response = url.urlopen(req)
print response.geturl()
print response.getcode()
data = response.read()
print data

Once I have built up my post url, data = response.read() gives me the content – I am trying to connect to a vcloud director api instance and the response shows the endpoints that I have access to. However if I use the Requests library as follows…..

....

def post_call(username, org, password, key, secret):

    endpoint = '<URL ENDPOINT>'
    post_url = endpoint + 'sessions'
    get_url = endpoint + 'org'
    headers = {'Accept':'application/*+xml;version=5.1', 
               'Authorization':'Basic  '+ base64.b64encode(username + "@" + org + ":" + password), 
               'x-id-sec':base64.b64encode(key + ":" + secret)}
    print headers
    post_call = requests.post(post_url, data=None, headers = headers)
    print post_call, "POST call"
    print post_call.text, "TEXT"
    print post_call.content, "CONTENT"
    post_call.status_code, "STATUS CODE"

....

….the print post_call.text and print post_call.content returns nothing, even though the status code equals 200 in the requests post call.

Why isn’t my response from Requests returning any text or content?

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Answers:

Method 1

Method 2

Method 3

Answers:

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Method 1

Requests doesn’t have an equivalent to Urlib2’s read().

>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.get("http://www.google.com")
>>> print response.content
'<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage"><head>....'
>>> print response.content == response.text
True

It looks like the POST request you are making is returning no content. Which is often the case with a POST request. Perhaps it set a cookie? The status code is telling you that the POST succeeded after all.

Edit for Python 3:

Python now handles data types differently. response.content returns a sequence of bytes (integers that represent ASCII) while response.text is a string (sequence of chars).

Thus,

>>> print response.content == response.text
False

>>> print str(response.content) == response.text
True

Method 2

If the response is in json you could do something like (python3):

import json
import requests as reqs

# Make the HTTP request.
response = reqs.get('http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/group_list')

# Use the json module to load CKAN's response into a dictionary.
response_dict = json.loads(response.text)

for i in response_dict:
    print("key: ", i, "val: ", response_dict[i])

To see everything in the response you can use .__dict__:

print(response.__dict__)

Method 3

If you push, for example image, to some API and want the result address(response) back you could do:

import requests
url = 'https://uguu.se/api.php?d=upload-tool'
data = {"name": filename}
files = {'file': open(full_file_path, 'rb')}
response = requests.post(url, data=data, files=files)
current_url = response.text
print(response.text)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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