What is Urllib Python?

The urllib library in Python provides developers with tools for working with URLs and making HTTP requests. Urllib is useful for fetching web pages, JSON data, images, and other content from the web.

What is Urllib?

Urllib is a package that comes built-in with Python (no installation required). It provides a simple interface for fetching data from the web using URLs.

Some key things urllib can do:

Making Requests with Urllib

Here is a simple example to fetch a web page using urllib and print the response:

import urllib.request

with urllib.request.urlopen('https://www.python.org/') as response:
   html = response.read()
   print(html)

We import urllib.request, open a URL, read the response into a variable, and print it out.

The urlopen() function handles all the HTTP protocol and header details for us. Other useful features of the Request object include:

When to Use Urllib

The urllib library is useful for basic HTTP requests without any advanced functionality. If you need to:

Then consider requests as a more full-featured alternative. But urllib is great for simple GET requests and when requests is not available.

In Summary

That covers the basics of using urllib in Python! Urllib provides a simple API for fetching data from URLs with minimal code. As your HTTP requests get more complex, explore the requests module and other 3rd party packages.