What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?

Question

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.

You could use a library called requests.

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

This is quite easy. Then you can do like this:

>>> print(r.status_code)
>>> print(r.headers)
>>> print(r.content)

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")

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.

It's simple enough with the powerful urllib3 library.

Import it like this:

import urllib3

http = urllib3.PoolManager()

And make a request like this:

response = http.request('GET', 'https://example.com')

print(response.data) # Raw data.
print(response.data.decode('utf-8')) # Text.
print(response.status) # Status code.
print(response.headers['Content-Type']) # Content type.

You can add headers too:

response = http.request('GET', 'https://example.com', headers={
    'key1': 'value1',
    'key2': 'value2'
})

More info can be found on the urllib3 documentation.

urllib3 is much safer and easier to use than the builtin urllib.request or http modules and is stable.