How do I use Python's httplib to send a POST to a URL, with a dictionary of parameters?

Question

I just want a function that can take 2 parameters:

the URL to POST to
a dictionary of parameters

How can this be done with httplib? thanks.

Please use urllib2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/321582/urllib2-data-sending. — S.Lott, Mar 03 '10 at 11:14

score 40 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 16 '16 at 00:20

40

>>> import httplib, urllib
>>> params = urllib.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
>>> headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
...            "Accept": "text/plain"}
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("musi-cal.mojam.com:80")
>>> conn.request("POST", "/cgi-bin/query", params, headers)
>>> response = conn.getresponse()
>>> print response.status, response.reason
200 OK
>>> data = response.read()
>>> conn.close()

edited Aug 16 '16 at 00:20

Martin Tournoij

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answered Mar 03 '10 at 09:38

TIMEX

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Credit where credit is due: this was ripped off directly from http://docs.python.org/release/2.6/library/httplib.html (or 2.5.2 or earlier, it hasn't changed much over the years) – dland Feb 06 '12 at 14:40
Do the params need to be in that format? can they be raw text? – Usman Ismail Feb 13 '13 at 14:55
Yes you can pass in raw text as params, `urllib.urlencode` just takes care of url encoding the string to be passed, if you print it out you will see that its just a string – Ole Apr 29 '13 at 09:15

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 01 '13 at 14:44

11

A simpler one, using just urllib:

import urllib
params = urllib.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.example.org/cgi-bin/query", params)
print f.read()

Found in Python docs for urllib module

answered Mar 01 '13 at 14:44

Beli

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sorry, but this most probably does a HTTP GET, not a POST – hko Oct 29 '13 at 15:26
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@hko No, it's from the POST example on that urllib page. Note that params are added with `, params` instead of `% params`. – Ed Brannin Mar 28 '14 at 18:13

How do I use Python's httplib to send a POST to a URL, with a dictionary of parameters?

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