What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?

Use the Requests library:

import requests
r = requests.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")

Then you can do stuff like this:

>>> print(r.status_code)
>>> print(r.headers)
>>> print(r.content)  # bytes
>>> print(r.text)     # r.content as str

Install Requests by running this command:

pip install requests

If you want solution with httplib2 to be oneliner consider instantiating anonymous Http object

import httplib2
resp, content = httplib2.Http().request("http://example.com/foo/bar")

Python 3:

import urllib.request
contents = urllib.request.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Python 2:

import urllib2
contents = urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Documentation for urllib.request and read.

Have a look at httplib2, which - next to a lot of very useful features - provides exactly what you want.

import httplib2

resp, content = httplib2.Http().request("http://example.com/foo/bar")

Where content would be the response body (as a string), and resp would contain the status and response headers.

It doesn't come included with a standard python install though (but it only requires standard python), but it's definitely worth checking out.

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