HTTP request methods

There are nine current HTTP request methods, which define a general action desired by the client. Each method carries a particular connotation as to how the server should process the request. The nine request methods are as follows:

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• HEAD
• CONNECT
• TRACE
• OPTIONS
• PATCH

The most common request methods that you will need are GET, POST, and PUT. GET requests are used for retrieving information from a website. POST and PUT requests are for sending information, such as user login data, to a website. These types of requests are usually sent only when submitting some type of form data, which we will cover in later chapters in this book.

In building a web scraper, the vast majority of the time you will be sending HTTP GET requests to a server in order to get a web page. The simplest example of a GET request for http://example.com/index.html looks something like this:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

The client sends this message to the server with the GET action to obtain the index.html resource using the 1.1 Version of the HTTP protocol. This first line of an HTTP request is called the request line and is the core of an HTTP request.