Simple URL GET/POST function in Python

requests

https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/

Here's a few common ways to use it:

import requests
url = 'https://...'
payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}


# GET
r = requests.get(url)


# GET with params in URL
r = requests.get(url, params=payload)


# POST with form-encoded data
r = requests.post(url, data=payload)


# POST with JSON
import json
r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))


# Response, status etc
r.text
r.status_code

httplib2

https://github.com/jcgregorio/httplib2

>>> from httplib2 import Http
>>> from urllib import urlencode
>>> h = Http()
>>> data = dict(name="Joe", comment="A test comment")
>>> resp, content = h.request("http://bitworking.org/news/223/Meet-Ares", "POST", urlencode(data))
>>> resp
{'status': '200', 'transfer-encoding': 'chunked', 'vary': 'Accept-Encoding,User-Agent',
'server': 'Apache', 'connection': 'close', 'date': 'Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:29:52 GMT',
'content-type': 'text/html'}

You could use this to wrap urllib2:

def URLRequest(url, params, method="GET"):
if method == "POST":
return urllib2.Request(url, data=urllib.urlencode(params))
else:
return urllib2.Request(url + "?" + urllib.urlencode(params))

That will return a Request object that has result data and response codes.

import urllib


def fetch_thing(url, params, method):
params = urllib.urlencode(params)
if method=='POST':
f = urllib.urlopen(url, params)
else:
f = urllib.urlopen(url+'?'+params)
return (f.read(), f.code)




content, response_code = fetch_thing(
'http://google.com/',
{'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0},
'GET'
)

[Update]

Some of these answers are old. Today I would use the requests module like the answer by robaple.

Even easier: via the requests module.

import requests
get_response = requests.get(url='http://google.com')
post_data = {'username':'joeb', 'password':'foobar'}
# POST some form-encoded data:
post_response = requests.post(url='http://httpbin.org/post', data=post_data)

To send data that is not form-encoded, send it serialised as a string (example taken from the documentation):

import json
post_response = requests.post(url='http://httpbin.org/post', data=json.dumps(post_data))
# If using requests v2.4.2 or later, pass the dict via the json parameter and it will be encoded directly:
post_response = requests.post(url='http://httpbin.org/post', json=post_data)

I know you asked for GET and POST but I will provide CRUD since others may need this just in case: (this was tested in Python 3.7)

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import http.client
import json


print("\n GET example")
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection("httpbin.org")
conn.request("GET", "/get")
response = conn.getresponse()
data = response.read().decode('utf-8')
print(response.status, response.reason)
print(data)




print("\n POST example")
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection('httpbin.org')
headers = {'Content-type': 'application/json'}
post_body = {'text': 'testing post'}
json_data = json.dumps(post_body)
conn.request('POST', '/post', json_data, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.read().decode())
print(response.status, response.reason)




print("\n PUT example ")
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection('httpbin.org')
headers = {'Content-type': 'application/json'}
post_body ={'text': 'testing put'}
json_data = json.dumps(post_body)
conn.request('PUT', '/put', json_data, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.read().decode(), response.reason)
print(response.status, response.reason)




print("\n delete example")
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection('httpbin.org')
headers = {'Content-type': 'application/json'}
post_body ={'text': 'testing delete'}
json_data = json.dumps(post_body)
conn.request('DELETE', '/delete', json_data, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.read().decode(), response.reason)
print(response.status, response.reason)