12.6. Using REST in Python

Issuing GET Requests
The Python module urllib2 makes reading URLs trivial:

import urllib2

url = 'http://www.acme.com/products/3322'
response = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()

Errors are reported as exceptions (urllib2.HTTPError or urllib2.URLError).

Issuing POST Requests
A POST request is just as easy, simply passing (encoded) request data as an extra parameter to urlopen, thus:

import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.acme.com/users/details'
params = urllib.urlencode({
  'firstName': 'John',
  'lastName': 'Doe'
})
response = urllib2.urlopen(url, params).read()

Note that encoding is done using a function from the urllib module.