Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

The http_request method takes care of creating a urllib.request.Request instance, sending it through the network and fetching back the response.

A request is sent to the specified URL to which query arguments are appended.

The first thing the function does is parse the URL, so that it can replace parts of it. This is done to be able to replace/append the query arguments with the one provided:

parts = vars(urllib.parse.urlparse(url))
if query:
    parts['query'] = urllib.parse.urlencode(query)

urllib.parse.urlencode will accept a dictionary of arguments, such as{'a': 5, 'b': 7}, and will give you back the string with the urlencode arguments: 'b=7&a=5'.

The resulting query string is then placed into the parsed parts of the url