Consuming HTTP

You might be interacting with a third-party service based on HTTP REST APIs, or you might be fetching content from a third party or just downloading a file that your software needs as the input. It doesn't really matter. Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to write an application and ignore HTTP; you will have to face it sooner or later. People expect HTTP support from all kind of applications. If you are writing an image viewer, they probably expect to be able to throw a URL that leads to an image to it and see it appear.

While they have never been really user friendly and obvious, the Python standard library has always had ways to interact with HTTP, and they are available out of the box.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

1. The urllib.request module provides the machinery required to submit an HTTP request. A light wrapper around it can solve most needs in terms of using HTTP:

import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
import json


def http_request(url,...