Ability to not send a user-agent header at all

[simonw]

Airtable appear to have blocked access to their API from the default HTTPX user-agent, possibly because a bunch of people have been using my completely legitimate, non-abusive Airtable backup script built on HTTPX: https://github.com/simonw/airtable-export

Rather than playing cat-and-mouse with different user-agents, I'd like to just not send a user-agent at all. Is there a way to do that with HTTPX?

This doesn't quite work, it sends the header with an empty string instead:

>>> httpx.get("https://httpbin.org/headers", headers={"user-agent": ""}).json()
{'headers': {'Accept': '*/*',
  'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
  'Host': 'httpbin.org',
  'User-Agent': '',
  'X-Amzn-Trace-Id': 'Root=1-6071c2cf-74cc2e6f2e2792bf08e8c70b'}}

Ideally I'd like to be able to do something like this, but it currently throws an error:

>>> httpx.get("https://httpbin.org/headers", headers={"user-agent": None}).json()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'encode'

[tomchristie]

Hiya Simon,

So we do provide that functionality, but not with the top-level API.

Instead you'd need to do this...

client = httpx.Client()
del client.headers["user-agent"]
client.get(...)

[aaronst]

It would be great if there was a way to not send default headers on a per-request basis. aiohttp has the skip_auto_headers, for comparison.

[hhartzer]

I'll use the workaround for now, but I'm also interested in this!