Python Requests and Beautiful Soup - Playing with HTTP Requests, HTML Parsing and APIs

Recently, while running the Redmond Python Meetup I’ve found that a great way to get started using Python is to pick a few common tools to start learning. Naturally, I gravitated towards teaching the basics of one of the most popular Python packages - Requests. I’ve also found it’s useful to throw in using Beatiful Soup to show folks how they can efficiently interact with HTML data after getting an HTML page.

Sound interesting? Let’s look at what I typically cover - including a few basic examples of how you can use Requests to make HTTP GET and POST requests.