Sending a request to a server

When you want to retrieve data from a web server, you send a GET request to the server. When sending a request, the URL will contain information on the resource from which you want data. The URL can be broken down into a few key parts. These include the protocol, the hostname, the URI, and the query parameters. The format of it looks like this:

Figure 17.1: URL format breakdown

We can see the following in this example:

• Protocol tells the client how to connect to the server. The two most common protocols are HTTP and HTTPS. In this example, we have used https.
• Hostname is the address of the server we want to connect to. In this example, it is example.com.
• URI is the uniform resource identifier (URI), and this tells the server the path to the resource we want. In this example, it is /downloads.
• Query Parameters tells the server about any additional information it needs. In this example, we have two query...