Rather than build your own using sockets etc I would use httplib Thus would get the data from the http server and parse the headers into a dictionary e.g.

import httplib
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.python.org")
conn.request("GET", "/index.html")
r1 = conn.getresponse()

headers = r1.getheaders()
print(headers)

gives

[('content-length', '16788'), ('accept-ranges', 'bytes'), ('server', 'Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_wsgi/2.5 Python/2.5.2'), ('last-modified', 'Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:30:46 GMT'), ('etag', '"105800d-4194-47f9e9871d580"'), ('date', 'Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:34:18 GMT'), ('content-type', 'text/html')]

and methods for put to send a dictionary as part of a request.

There are more than a couple ways to encode headers as JSON, but my first thought would be to convert the headers attribute to an actual dictionary instead of accessing it as requests.structures.CaseInsensitiveDict

import requests, json
r = requests.get("https://www.python.org/")
rh = json.dumps(r.headers.__dict__['_store'])
print rh

{'content-length': ('content-length', '45474'), 'via': ('via', '1.1 varnish'), 'x-cache': ('x-cache', 'HIT'), 'accept-ranges': ('accept-ranges', 'bytes'), 'strict-transport-security': ('strict-transport-security', 'max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains'), 'vary': ('vary', 'Cookie'), 'server': ('server', 'nginx'), 'x-served-by': ('x-served-by', 'cache-iad2132-IAD'), 'x-cache-hits': ('x-cache-hits', '1'), 'date': ('date', 'Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:13:37 GMT'), 'x-frame-options': ('x-frame-options', 'SAMEORIGIN'), 'content-type': ('content-type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8'), 'age': ('age', '1483')}

Depending on exactly what you want on the headers you can specifically access them after this, but this will give you all the information contained in the headers, if in a slightly different format.

If you prefer a different format, you can also convert your headers to a dictionary:

import requests, json
r = requests.get("https://www.python.org/")
print json.dumps(dict(r.headers))

{"content-length": "45682", "via": "1.1 varnish", "x-cache": "HIT", "accept-ranges": "bytes", "strict-transport-security": "max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains", "vary": "Cookie", "server": "nginx", "x-served-by": "cache-at50-ATL", "x-cache-hits": "5", "date": "Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:08:15 GMT", "x-frame-options": "SAMEORIGIN", "content-type": "text/html; charset=utf-8", "age": "951"}

Update: Based on comment of OP, that only the response headers are needed. Even more easy as written in below documentation of Requests module:

We can view the server's response headers using a Python dictionary:

Copy>>> r.headers
{
    'content-encoding': 'gzip',
    'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
    'connection': 'close',
    'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
    'x-runtime': '148ms',
    'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
    'content-type': 'application/json'
}

And especially the documentation notes:

The dictionary is special, though: it's made just for HTTP headers. According to RFC 7230, HTTP Header names are case-insensitive.

So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want:

and goes on to explain even more cleverness concerning RFC compliance.

The Requests documentation states:

Using Response.iter_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise have to handle when using Response.raw directly. When streaming a download, the above is the preferred and recommended way to retrieve the content.

It offers as example:

Copy>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events', stream=True)
>>> r.raw
<requests.packages.urllib3.response.HTTPResponse object at 0x101194810>
>>> r.raw.read(10)
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03'

But also offers advice on how to do it in practice by redirecting to a file etc. and using a different method:

Using Response.iter_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise have to handle when using Response.raw directly

Edit: For post request:

import requests
import json
url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/"

payload = {
    "userId": 10,
    "id": 901,
    "title": "sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit",
    "body": "quia et suscipit\nsuscipit recusandae consequuntur expedita et cum\nreprehenderit molestiae ut ut quas totam\nnostrum rerum est autem sunt rem eveniet architecto"
 }
headers = {
    'content-type': "application/json",
    'cache-control': "no-cache",
    'postman-token': "c71c65a6-07f4-a2a4-a6f8-dca3fd706a7a"
    }

response = requests.request("POST", url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)

print(type(response.json()))

class 'dict'

You can use something like this:

import requests

url = "https://api.icndb.com/jokes/random"

headers = {
    'cache-control': "no-cache",
    'postman-token': "77047c8b-caed-2b2c-ab33-dbddf52a7a9f"
    }

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers)

print(type(response.json()))

class 'dict'