Working With APIs and HTTP Requests

The requests package (pip install requests) is the standard way to call a web API from Python.

import requests

response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/users/octocat")
print(response.status_code)
data = response.json()
print(data["login"])

Expected output

200
octocat

.status_code tells you whether the request succeeded (200) or failed (404 not found, 500 server error, etc.); .json() parses a JSON response body straight into a Python dictionary.

Common mistakes

• Not checking status_code (or catching requests.RequestException) before assuming .json() will contain useful data — a failed request can return an error page instead of the expected JSON.