python request with authentication (access_token)

Question

I am trying to get an API query into python. The command line

curl --header "Authorization:access_token myToken" https://website.com/id

gives some json output. myToken is a hexadecimal variable that remains constant throughout. I would like to make this call from python so that I can loop through different ids and analyze the output. Any ideas? Before authentication was needed I have done that with urllib2. I have also taken a look at the requests module but couldn't figure out how to do that.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

The requests package has a very nice API for HTTP requests, adding a custom header works like this (source: official docs):

>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.get(
... 'https://website.com/id', headers={'Authorization': 'access_token myToken'})

If you don't want to use an external dependency, the same thing using urllib2 of the standard library looks like this (source: the missing manual):

>>> import urllib2
>>> response = urllib2.urlopen(
... urllib2.Request('https://website.com/id', headers={'Authorization': 'access_token myToken'})