How to Convert a cURL Command to Python (requests)

This table covers virtually every cURL command you'll meet. Learn it once and the conversion becomes automatic:

Here's a typical authenticated API call in cURL:

curl -X POST https://postman-echo.com/post \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tok_123" \
  -d '{"name":"mithun","plan":"pro"}'

And the direct requests translation — -X POST → requests.post, the two -H flags → headers={}, the JSON -d → json={}:

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://postman-echo.com/post",
    headers={
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Authorization": "Bearer tok_123",
    },
    json={"name": "mithun", "plan": "pro"},
)
print(r.status_code, r.json()["json"])

I ran both against the live echo server. They returned the same thing — the server saw an identical body and auth header either way:

# curl     -> body: {'name': 'mithun', 'plan': 'pro'} | auth: Bearer tok_123
# requests -> 200  {'name': 'mithun', 'plan': 'pro'} | auth: Bearer tok_123

Query strings are where hand-conversion trips people up. Don't paste ?q=python&page=2 into the URL — pass a params dict and let requests build the query string (and URL-encode it) for you:

# curl "https://postman-echo.com/get?q=python&page=2" -A "my-app/1.0"

import requests
r = requests.get(
    "https://postman-echo.com/get",
    params={"q": "python", "page": "2"},
    headers={"User-Agent": "my-app/1.0"},
)
print(r.json()["args"])   # -> {'q': 'python', 'page': '2'}

Tested: the server echoed {'q': 'python', 'page': '2'} and the custom User-Agent came through — exactly as the cURL version. Using params also means special characters get encoded correctly, which is easy to get wrong by hand.

When you just want the Python and don't want to think about flags, paste the whole command into the free cURL to Python converter. It parses the command — method, headers, body, auth, params — and returns ready-to-run requests code. It runs in your browser, so the command (which often contains tokens) never leaves your machine.

• JSON vs form: -d '{...}' is *usually* JSON → use json=. But -d "a=b&c=d" is form data → use data=. cURL doesn't distinguish; you have to.
• `requests` follows redirects by default — cURL does not unless you pass -L. If you're matching cURL exactly, add allow_redirects=False.
• Cookies and sessions: for multiple calls that share cookies/auth, use a requests.Session() instead of repeating headers on every call.
• File uploads: -F "file=@photo.png" becomes files={"file": open("photo.png", "rb")} — and don't also set Content-Type by hand; requests sets the multipart boundary for you.
• `--insecure`/`-k` maps to verify=False, but only use it for local testing — it disables TLS verification.