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!

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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 requests
res = 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.