Rest API programming: Requests vs urllib2 in Python 2.7 -- the API needs authentication (Error 401)

Question

I am a beginner trying to learn REST API programming through Python 2.7 to get data from Socialcast API. From my research it looks like requests or urllib2 would work. I need to authenticate with username and id for the API. I tried using urllib2 and it gave me error 401.

Which one should I use? My goal is to produce .csv files from the data so I can visualize it. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The question will yield a bit of an opinion based response, but I would suggest using Requests. I find that when making request that require parameters using Requests is easier to manage. An example for the Socialcast using Requests would be

parameters={"email" : emailAddress, "passoword" : password}
r = requests.post(postUrl, parameters)

The post url would be the url to make the post request and emailAddress and password would be the vales you use to login in.

For the csv, take a look here which includes a tutorial on going from json to csv.