Using urllib2 with Django REST Framework

Python’s standard library comes with some nice modules you can use to test your api or even write a full client.

Using the ‘GET’ method

Here’s an example which does a ‘GET’ on the model-resource example in the sandbox.:

>>> import urllib2
>>> r = urllib2.urlopen('htpp://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example')
>>> r.getcode() # Check if the response was ok
200
>>> print r.read() # Examin the response itself
[{"url": "http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/1/", "baz": "sdf", "foo": true, "bar": 123}]

Using the ‘POST’ method

And here’s an example which does a ‘POST’ to create a new instance. First let’s encode the data we want to POST. We’ll use urllib for encoding and the time module to send the current time as as a string value for our POST.:

>>> import urllib, time
>>> d = urllib.urlencode((('bar', 123), ('baz', time.asctime())))

Now use the Request class and specify the ‘Content-type’:

>>> req = urllib2.Request('http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/', data=d, headers={'Content-Type':'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'})
>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>>> resp.getcode()
201
>>> resp.read()
'{"url": "http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/4/", "baz": "Fri Dec 30 18:22:52 2011", "foo": false, "bar": 123}'

That should get you started to write a client for your own api.