POST method - Python requests

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.  

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 -

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.