Get Started

Printing HTTP request results in Python using urllib

You have just packaged and sent a GET request to "https://campus.datacamp.com/courses/1606/4135?ex=2" and then caught the response. You saw that such a response is a http.client.HTTPResponse object. The question remains: what can you do with this response?

Well, as it came from an HTML page, you could read it to extract the HTML and, in fact, such a http.client.HTTPResponse object has an associated read() method. In this exercise, you'll build on your previous great work to extract the response and print the HTML.

This is a part of the course

“Intermediate Importing Data in Python”

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • Send the request and catch the response in the variable response with the function urlopen(), as in the previous exercise.
  • Extract the response using the read() method and store the result in the variable html.
  • Print the string html.
  • Hit submit to perform all of the above and to close the response: be tidy!

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Import packages
from urllib.request import urlopen, Request

# Specify the url
url = "https://campus.datacamp.com/courses/1606/4135?ex=2"

# This packages the request
request = Request(url)

# Sends the request and catches the response: response


# Extract the response: html


# Print the html


# Be polite and close the response!
response.close()
Edit and Run Code