Python, HTTPS GET with basic authentication

In Python 3 the following will work. I am using the lower level http.client from the standard library. Also check out section 2 of rfc2617 for details of basic authorization. This code won't check the certificate is valid, but will set up a https connection. See the http.client docs on how to do that.

from http.client import HTTPSConnection
from base64 import b64encode
#This sets up the https connection
c = HTTPSConnection("www.google.com")
#we need to base 64 encode it 
#and then decode it to acsii as python 3 stores it as a byte string
userAndPass = b64encode(b"username:password").decode("ascii")
headers = { 'Authorization' : 'Basic %s' %  userAndPass }
#then connect
c.request('GET', '/', headers=headers)
#get the response back
res = c.getresponse()
# at this point you could check the status etc
# this gets the page text
data = res.read()  

Use the power of Python and lean on one of the best libraries around: requests

import requests

r = requests.get('https://my.website.com/rest/path', auth=('myusername', 'mybasicpass'))
print(r.text)

Variable r (requests response) has a lot more parameters that you can use. Best thing is to pop into the interactive interpreter and play around with it, and/or read requests docs.

ubuntu@hostname:/home/ubuntu$ python3
Python 3.4.3 (default, Oct 14 2015, 20:28:29)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://my.website.com/rest/path', auth=('myusername', 'mybasicpass'))
>>> dir(r)
['__attrs__', '__bool__', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getstate__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__iter__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__nonzero__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__setstate__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_content', '_content_consumed', 'apparent_encoding', 'close', 'connection', 'content', 'cookies', 'elapsed', 'encoding', 'headers', 'history', 'iter_content', 'iter_lines', 'json', 'links', 'ok', 'raise_for_status', 'raw', 'reason', 'request', 'status_code', 'text', 'url']
>>> r.content
b'{"battery_status":0,"margin_status":0,"timestamp_status":null,"req_status":0}'
>>> r.text
'{"battery_status":0,"margin_status":0,"timestamp_status":null,"req_status":0}'
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers
CaseInsensitiveDict({'x-powered-by': 'Express', 'content-length': '77', 'date': 'Fri, 20 May 2016 02:06:18 GMT', 'server': 'nginx/1.6.3', 'connection': 'keep-alive', 'content-type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8'})