Working with APIs and JSON

HTTP requests with requests library, parsing JSON, and calling REST APIs.

Installing requests

pip install requests

Making a GET Request

import requests

response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/users/octocat")
print(response.status_code)  # 200
data = response.json()
print(data["login"])         # octocat
print(data["public_repos"]) # number of repos

Working with JSON

import json

# Python dict → JSON string
person = {"name": "Alice", "age": 30}
json_str = json.dumps(person, indent=2)
print(json_str)

# JSON string → Python dict
back = json.loads(json_str)
print(back["name"])

# Save / load JSON file
with open("data.json", "w") as f:
    json.dump(person, f, indent=2)

POST Request Example

payload = {"title": "Python 2026", "body": "Great tutorial", "userId": 1}
response = requests.post(
    "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts",
    json=payload
)
print(response.status_code)  # 201 Created
print(response.json())