Requesting data from the Internet¶

There’s an amazing variety of data out there on the Internet. We are all familiar with using a web browser to access it. We can also write computer programs that access data. Rather just showing it directly to people, computer programs can process the data in useful ways. They can also act on a much larger scale, processing more data from more sources.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the python requests module to request data in python programs. We will also take a look behind the scenes to give you a better sense of what’s really going on when you request data over the Internet, either a browser or from a python program.