How many types of requests are there in Python?

When writing Python code that interacts with other systems and APIs, you'll likely need to make HTTP requests to send or receive data. Python provides several libraries to handle different types of requests. In this article, we'll give an overview of the main options.

Sending Basic Requests

For basic HTTP requests, the requests library is the easiest to use. Here's an example GET request:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/data')
print(response.text)

And a POST request:

import requests

data = {'key': 'value'}
response = requests.post('https://api.example.com/data', data=data)

The requests library handles all the HTTP protocol basics for you.

Asynchronous Requests

Sometimes you may want to send multiple requests simultaneously and process the responses as they complete instead of waiting for each one to finish. This is where asyncio and aiohttp come in:

import asyncio
import aiohttp

async def get_data(url):
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get(url) as response:
            return await response.text()

# Send 3 requests concurrently 
urls = ['https://url1.com', 'https://url2.com', 'https://url3.com']
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
futures = [loop.run_in_executor(None, get_data, url) for url in urls]
for response in await asyncio.gather(*futures):
    print(response)

The key difference is that instead of waiting for each request to complete, the requests are fired off simultaneously.

Framework-Level Requests

If you're building a web application with a framework like Django or Flask, the framework will have its own request handling built-in. For example, in Flask you can access the incoming HTTP request data through the global request object.