Understand what REST APIs are and how HTTP methods work
Use the requests library to make GET and POST calls
Handle HTTP status codes and response errors
Pass query parameters and authentication headers
🌐 API Request Simulator
Select an API endpoint and method to see the Python requests code and a simulated JSON response.
Python Code
Response
What Is a REST API?
A REST API (Representational State Transfer) is a web service that lets programs talk to each other over HTTP. You send a request to a URL (called an endpoint), and the server sends back data — usually JSON.
Real-world examples: weather data (OpenWeatherMap), location data (Google Maps), tweets (Twitter API), payment processing (Stripe).
HTTP Methods
GET — Retrieve data. Does not change server state. Safe to repeat.
POST — Send new data to create a resource. Body contains the payload.
PUT / PATCH — Update an existing resource (full replace vs. partial update).
DELETE — Remove a resource.
The requests Library
requests is the standard Python library for HTTP. Install with pip install requests. Key methods: requests.get(url), requests.post(url, json=data). Always check response.status_code and call response.raise_for_status() to turn HTTP errors into exceptions.
Quick Check
1. What HTTP method should you use to retrieve a list of users from an API without changing any data?
GET
POST
DELETE
PATCH
2. What does HTTP status code 404 mean?
The request succeeded
The server has an internal error
The requested resource was not found
Authentication is required
3. How do you convert a requests Response to a Python dict?
response.text()
response.json()
json.load(response)
dict(response)
4. Why should you set a timeout when calling requests.get()?
To limit the size of the response
It is required by all REST APIs
To prevent your program from hanging forever if the server doesn't respond