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Introduction

httplib2 is a comprehensive HTTP client library, httplib2.py supports many features left out of other HTTP libraries.

###HTTP and HTTPS HTTPS support is only available if the socket module was compiled with SSL support.

###Keep-Alive Supports HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive, keeping the socket open and performing multiple requests over the same connection if possible.

###Authentication The following three types of HTTP Authentication are supported. These can be used over both HTTP and HTTPS.

  • Digest
  • Basic
  • WSSE

###Caching The module can optionally operate with a private cache that understands the Cache-Control: header and uses both the ETag and Last-Modified cache validators.

###All Methods The module can handle any HTTP request method, not just GET and POST.

###Redirects Automatically follows 3XX redirects on GETs.

###Compression Handles both 'deflate' and 'gzip' types of compression.

###Lost update support Automatically adds back ETags into PUT requests to resources we have already cached. This implements Section 3.2 of Detecting the Lost Update Problem Using Unreserved Checkout.

###Unit Tested A large and growing set of unit tests.

Installation

$ pip install httplib2

Usage

A simple retrieval:

import httplib2
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
(resp_headers, content) = h.request("http://example.org/", "GET")

The 'content' is the content retrieved from the URL. The content is already decompressed or unzipped if necessary.

To PUT some content to a server that uses SSL and Basic authentication:

import httplib2
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
h.add_credentials('name', 'password')
(resp, content) = h.request("https://example.org/chapter/2",
                            "PUT", body="This is text",
                            headers={'content-type':'text/plain'} )

Use the Cache-Control: header to control how the caching operates.

import httplib2
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
(resp, content) = h.request("http://bitworking.org/", "GET")
...
(resp, content) = h.request("http://bitworking.org/", "GET",
                            headers={'cache-control':'no-cache'})

The first request will be cached and since this is a request to bitworking.org it will be set to be cached for two hours, because that is how I have my server configured. Any subsequent GET to that URI will return the value from the on-disk cache and no request will be made to the server. You can use the Cache-Control: header to change the caches behavior and in this example the second request adds the Cache-Control: header with a value of 'no-cache' which tells the library that the cached copy must not be used when handling this request.

More example usage can be found at: