Streaming API¶

aiohttp uses streams for retrieving BODIES: aiohttp.web.Request.content and aiohttp.ClientResponse.content are properties with stream API.

class aiohttp.StreamReader¶

The reader from incoming stream.

User should never instantiate streams manually but use existing aiohttp.web.Request.content and aiohttp.ClientResponse.content properties for accessing raw BODY data.

Reading Methods¶

coroutine StreamReader.read(n=-1)¶

Read up to n bytes. If n is not provided, or set to -1, read until EOF and return all read bytes.

If the EOF was received and the internal buffer is empty, return an empty bytes object.

Parameters:	n (int) – how many bytes to read, `-1` for the whole stream.
Return bytes:	the given data

coroutine StreamReader.readany()¶

Read next data portion for the stream.

Returns immediately if internal buffer has a data.

Return bytes:	the given data

coroutine StreamReader.readexactly(n)¶

Read exactly n bytes.

Raise an asyncio.IncompleteReadError if the end of the stream is reached before n can be read, the asyncio.IncompleteReadError.partial attribute of the exception contains the partial read bytes.

Parameters:	n (int) – how many bytes to read.
Return bytes:	the given data

coroutine StreamReader.readline()¶

Read one line, where “line” is a sequence of bytes ending with \n.

If EOF is received, and \n was not found, the method will return the partial read bytes.

If the EOF was received and the internal buffer is empty, return an empty bytes object.

Return bytes:	the given line

coroutine StreamReader.readchunk()¶

Read a chunk of data as it was received by the server.

Returns a tuple of (data, end_of_HTTP_chunk).

When chunked transfer encoding is used, end_of_HTTP_chunk is a bool indicating if the end of the data corresponds to the end of a HTTP chunk, otherwise it is always False.

Return tuple[bytes, bool]:
	a chunk of data and a `bool` that is `True` when the end of the returned chunk corresponds to the end of a HTTP chunk.

Asynchronous Iteration Support¶

Stream reader supports asynchronous iteration over BODY.

By default it iterates over lines:

async for line in response.content:
    print(line)

Also there are methods for iterating over data chunks with maximum size limit and over any available data.

async-for StreamReader.iter_chunked(n)¶

Iterates over data chunks with maximum size limit:

async for data in response.content.iter_chunked(1024):
    print(data)

async-for StreamReader.iter_any()¶

Iterates over data chunks in order of intaking them into the stream:

async for data in response.content.iter_any():
    print(data)

async-for StreamReader.iter_chunks()¶

Iterates over data chunks as received from the server:

async for data, _ in response.content.iter_chunks():
    print(data)

If chunked transfer encoding is used, the original http chunks formatting can be retrieved by reading the second element of returned tuples:

buffer = b""

async for data, end_of_http_chunk in response.content.iter_chunks():
    buffer += data
    if end_of_http_chunk:
        print(buffer)
        buffer = b""

Helpers¶

StreamReader.exception()¶: Get the exception occurred on data reading.

aiohttp.is_eof()¶

Return True if EOF was reached.

Internal buffer may be not empty at the moment.