Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making REST requests with urllib


A web application has two essential parts:

  • A client: This can be a user's browser, but may also be a mobile device app. In some cases, a web server may be a client of other web servers.
  • A server: This provides the web services and resources we've been looking at, in the Implementing web services with WSGI, Using the Flask framework for RESTful APIs, and Parsing the query string in a request recipes, as well as other recipes, such as Parsing a JSON request and Implementing authentication for web services.

A browser-based client will generally be written in JavaScript. Mobile apps are written in a variety of languages, with a focus on Java for Android devices and Objective-C with Swift for iOS devices.

There are several user stories that involve RESTful API clients written in Python. How can we create a Python program that is a client of RESTful web services?

Getting ready

We'll assume that we have a web server based on the Implementing web services with WSGI, Using...