Add Python API support

httpie is a very cool CLI tool, far better than curl. It would be great if there would a minimal documented API support so that it can also be used as a Python module you can import and make requests with. The way I would expect it to work might be something like this:

>>> from httpie import interpret_args
>>> resp = interpret_args("http GET http://localhost:8000/help")
>>> resp
<Response [200]>
>>> resp.status_code
200
>>> 

Thoughts?

[jakubroztocil]

The interesting part of what HTTPie does in this regard is the translation of a command line argument list to the **kwargs passed to requests.request().

If it was to be exposed, then it would look something like this:

import requests
from httpie.cli import parser
from httpie.context import Environment
from httpie.client import get_requests_kwargs


def command_to_requests_kwargs(command):
    args = parser.parse_args(args=command.split(), env=Environment())
    return get_requests_kwargs(args)


kwargs = command_to_requests_kwargs("""
    --auth-type=digest  --auth=user:password'
    PUT httpbin.org/put
        Referer:example.org
        User-Agent:Bacon/1.0
""")


>>> kwargs
{'allow_redirects': False,
 'auth': <requests.auth.HTTPDigestAuth at 0x10db48ed0>,
 'cert': None,
 'data': OrderedDict(),
 'files': OrderedDict(),
 'headers': CaseInsensitiveDict({'Referer': 'example.org', 'User-Agent': 'Bacon/1.0'}),
 'method': 'patch',
 'params': ParamDict(),
 'proxies': {},
 'stream': True,
 'timeout': 30,
 'url': 'http://example.org/foo',
 'verify': True}

>>> requests.request(**kwargs)
<Response [405]>

HTTPie actually spits out the Python code used to make the request when the --debug flag is set:

$ http --debug --auth-type=digest --auth=user:password PATCH example.org/foo Referer:example.org User-Agent:Bacon/1.0
HTTPie 0.8.0
HTTPie data: /Users/jakub/.httpie
Requests 2.2.1
Pygments 1.6
Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 21 2013, 11:09:15)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.1.72)] darwin

>>> requests.request({'allow_redirects': False,
 'auth': <requests.auth.HTTPDigestAuth object at 0x10c8b8a10>,
 'cert': None,
 'data': OrderedDict(),
 'files': OrderedDict(),
 'headers': CaseInsensitiveDict({'Referer': 'example.org', 'User-Agent': 'Bacon/1.0'}),
 'method': 'patch',
 'params': ParamDict(),
 'proxies': {},
 'stream': True,
 'timeout': 30,
 'url': 'http://example.org/foo',
 'verify': True})

[Almad]

This is a duplicate to #551—let’s use that one as a canonical issue.