# Basic API Requests

Only basic understanding of how the web works is required to scrape the web using BrowserAPI. Our team made it so that anyone can extract HTML from almost any website, without having to write an entire application.

### The `url` parameter 

{% hint style="warning" %}
**The `url` parameter has to be encoded in order for your request to pass!**
{% endhint %}

Before diving into the more advanced features of BrowserAPI, it is important to understand how the API works. In order to scrape a web page using our services, simply append the URL of the page you want to scrape to the API’s base endpoint, along with your API key. 

The `url` parameter represents the webpage that you are targeting and is <mark style="color:yellow;">**required**</mark> to make a request on our API. Failing to pass this parameter will result in `400: Bad Request`.

This being said, it only takes two parameters to extract the full HTML code of the page you want to scrape using BrowserAPI: `api_key` and `url`.

### Supported HTTP Methods

Whilst GET requests are quite common in web scraping, more advanced users may want to send POST or PUT requests to scrape forms or even other APIs. Currently, **BrowserAPI** offers support for the following HTTP requests:

* [**GET** requests](https://docs.webscrapingapi.com/browser-api/basic-api-requests/get-request)
* [**POST** requests](https://docs.webscrapingapi.com/browser-api/post-put-and-patch-requests#basic-post-request)
* [**PUT** requests](https://docs.webscrapingapi.com/browser-api/post-put-and-patch-requests#basic-put-request)
* [**PATCH** requests](https://docs.webscrapingapi.com/browser-api/post-put-and-patch-requests#basic-patch-request)