Don't!

I know, that's the "answer" nobody wants. But if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right, right?

This seeming like a good idea probably stems from a fairly wide misconception that shell commands such as curl are anything other than programs themselves.

So what you're asking is "how do I run this other program, from within my program, just to make a measly little web request?". That's crazy, there's got to be a better way right?

Uxio's answer works, sure. But it hardly looks very Pythonic, does it? That's a lot of work just for one little request. Python's supposed to be about flying! Anyone writing that is probably wishing they just call'd curl!

it works, but is there a better way?

Yes, there is a better way!

Requests: HTTP for Humans

Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python.

Let's GET this page:

import requestsres = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26000336')

That's it, really! You then have the raw res.text, or res.json() output, the res.headers, etc.

You can see the docs (linked above) for details of setting all the options, since I imagine OP has moved on by now, and you - the reader now - likely need different ones.

But, for example, it's as simple as:

url     = 'http://example.tld'payload = { 'key' : 'val' }headers = {}res = requests.post(url, data=payload, headers=headers)

You can even use a nice Python dict to supply the query string in a GET request with params={}.

Simple and elegant. Keep calm, and fly on.

You could use urllib as @roippi said:

import urllib2data = '{"nw_src": "10.0.0.1/32", "nw_dst": "10.0.0.2/32", "nw_proto": "ICMP", "actions": "ALLOW", "priority": "10"}'url = 'http://localhost:8080/firewall/rules/0000000000000001'req = urllib2.Request(url, data, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'})f = urllib2.urlopen(req)for x in f:    print(x)f.close()

Use this tool (hosted here for free) to convert your curl command to equivalent Python requests code:

Example: This,

curl 'https://www.example.com/' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' -H 'Origin: https://www.example.com' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'Cookie: SESSID=ABCDEF' --data-binary 'Pathfinder' --compressed

Gets converted neatly to:

import requestscookies = {    'SESSID': 'ABCDEF',}headers = {    'Connection': 'keep-alive',    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0',    'Origin': 'https://www.example.com',    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br',}data = 'Pathfinder'response = requests.post('https://www.example.com/', headers=headers, cookies=cookies, data=data)