[python] How to send POST request?

I found this script online:

import httplib, urllib
params = urllib.urlencode({'number': 12524, 'type': 'issue', 'action': 'show'})
headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
            "Accept": "text/plain"}
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("bugs.python.org")
conn.request("POST", "", params, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print response.status, response.reason
302 Found
data = response.read()
data
'Redirecting to <a href="http://bugs.python.org/issue12524">http://bugs.python.org/issue12524</a>'
conn.close()

But I don't understand how to use it with PHP or what everything inside the params variable is or how to use it. Can I please have a little help with trying to get this to work?

Use requests library to GET, POST, PUT or DELETE by hitting a REST API endpoint. Pass the rest api endpoint url in url, payload(dict) in data and header/metadata in headers

import requests, json

url = "bugs.python.org"

payload = {"number": 12524, 
           "type": "issue", 
           "action": "show"}

header = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
          "Accept": "text/plain"} 

response_decoded_json = requests.post(url, data=payload, headers=header)
response_json = response_decoded_json.json()

print response_json

If you don't want to use a module you have to install like requests, and your use case is very basic, then you can use urllib2

urllib2.urlopen(url, body)

See the documentation for urllib2 here: https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html.

If you need your script to be portable and you would rather not have any 3rd party dependencies, this is how you send POST request purely in Python 3.

from urllib.parse import urlencode
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen

url = 'https://httpbin.org/post' # Set destination URL here
post_fields = {'foo': 'bar'}     # Set POST fields here

request = Request(url, urlencode(post_fields).encode())
json = urlopen(request).read().decode()
print(json)

Sample output:

{
  "args": {}, 
  "data": "", 
  "files": {}, 
  "form": {
    "foo": "bar"
  }, 
  "headers": {
    "Accept-Encoding": "identity", 
    "Content-Length": "7", 
    "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", 
    "Host": "httpbin.org", 
    "User-Agent": "Python-urllib/3.3"
  }, 
  "json": null, 
  "origin": "127.0.0.1", 
  "url": "https://httpbin.org/post"
}

You can't achieve POST requests using urllib (only for GET), instead try using requests module, e.g.:

Example 1.0:

import requests

base_url="www.server.com"
final_url="/{0}/friendly/{1}/url".format(base_url,any_value_here)

payload = {'number': 2, 'value': 1}
response = requests.post(final_url, data=payload)

print(response.text) #TEXT/HTML
print(response.status_code, response.reason) #HTTP

Example 1.2:

>>> import requests

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}

>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data=payload)
>>> print(r.text)
{
  ...
  "form": {
    "key2": "value2",
    "key1": "value1"
  },
  ...
}

Example 1.3:

>>> import json

>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}

>>> r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))

Your data dictionary conteines names of form input fields, you just keep on right their values to find results. form view Header configures browser to retrieve type of data you declare. With requests library it's easy to send POST:

import requests

url = "https://bugs.python.org"
data = {'@number': 12524, '@type': 'issue', '@action': 'show'}
headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "Accept":"text/plain"}
response = requests.post(url, data=data, headers=headers)

print(response.text)

More about Request object: https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/api/