cURL to Python

What is curl-to-Python?

This tool converts a curl command into a Python script using the requests library — the de facto standard HTTP client for Python, whose headers, data, auth, and files parameters map almost one-to-one onto curl's own flags.

How it works

The parser walks the curl command's tokens — respecting quoted strings — and builds a structured description of the request: method, url, headers, a raw data string, form fields split into file vs. non-file, an optional Basic Auth pair, and the insecure flag. The Python emitter turns that into a single requests.request(...) call. Headers become a headers dict; -u user:pass becomes auth=(user, pass), which requests turns into an HTTP Basic Authorization header automatically. Critically, a -d/--data body is assigned to a Python string and passed as data=data rather than being json.loads'd into a dict and passed as json=... — that keeps the exact bytes curl would send (key order, whitespace, number formatting) instead of risking requests re-serializing the payload differently.

Features

• Targets the requests library — one pip install requests away from running
• Body passed through as a raw string, never re-parsed as JSON
• -F/--form fields split into a data dict (text fields) and a files dict using open(path, 'rb') (file fields)
• -u Basic Auth mapped to auth=(user, pass)
• -k/--insecure mapped to verify=False

Example

Input: curl -X POST https://api.example.com/v1/users -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "X-Api-Key: abc123" -d '{"name":"Ada Lovelace","role":"admin"}'

Output:

import requests

headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'X-Api-Key': 'abc123',
}

data = '{"name":"Ada Lovelace","role":"admin"}'

response = requests.request(
    'POST',
    'https://api.example.com/v1/users',
    headers=headers,
    data=data,
)

print(response.status_code)
print(response.text)

Common errors

Because data is a raw string, requests sends it exactly as-is but does not automatically set a Content-Type header for you the way json=... would — if the original curl command didn't include a -H "Content-Type: application/json", the server may not correctly interpret a JSON-looking body. response.status_code being 200 doesn't guarantee success at the application level — check the response body for API-specific error fields.

Best practices

Call response.raise_for_status() if you want an exception on 4xx/5xx instead of silently printing the body. Reuse a requests.Session() across multiple calls to the same host to get connection pooling and cookie persistence for free, and avoid verify=False outside local development against a self-signed certificate.