Web and API Requests

Pydantic models are a great way to validating and serializing data for requests and responses. Pydantic is instrumental in many web frameworks and libraries, such as FastAPI, Django, Flask, and HTTPX.

httpx requests

httpx is a HTTP client for Python 3 with synchronous and asynchronous APIs. In the below example, we query the JSONPlaceholder API to get a user's data and validate it with a Pydantic model.

import httpx

from pydantic import BaseModel, EmailStr


class User(BaseModel):
    id: int
    name: str
    email: EmailStr


url = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/1'

response = httpx.get(url)
response.raise_for_status()

user = User.model_validate(response.json())
print(repr(user))
#> User(id=1, name='Leanne Graham', email='[email protected]')

The TypeAdapter tool from Pydantic often comes in quite handy when working with HTTP requests. Consider a similar example where we are validating a list of users:

from pprint import pprint
from typing import List

import httpx

from pydantic import BaseModel, EmailStr, TypeAdapter


class User(BaseModel):
    id: int
    name: str
    email: EmailStr


url = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/'  # (1)!

response = httpx.get(url)
response.raise_for_status()

users_list_adapter = TypeAdapter(List[User])

users = users_list_adapter.validate_python(response.json())
pprint([u.name for u in users])
"""
['Leanne Graham',
 'Ervin Howell',
 'Clementine Bauch',
 'Patricia Lebsack',
 'Chelsey Dietrich',
 'Mrs. Dennis Schulist',
 'Kurtis Weissnat',
 'Nicholas Runolfsdottir V',
 'Glenna Reichert',
 'Clementina DuBuque']
"""

1. Note, we're querying the /users/ endpoint here to get a list of users.