The httplib2 module is a comprehensive HTTP client library with the following features:
- 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.
- 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.
- Proxies
- If the Socksipy module is installed then httplib2 can handle sock4, sock5 and http proxies.
- 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
The httplib2 module defines the following variables:
- debuglevel
-
The amount of debugging information to print. The default is 0.
The httplib2 module may raise the following Exceptions. Note that
there is an option that turns exceptions into
normal responses with an HTTP status code indicating
an error occured. See Http.force_exception_to_status_code
- exception HttpLib2Error
-
The Base Exception for all exceptions raised by httplib2.
- exception RedirectMissingLocation
-
A 3xx redirect response code was provided but no Location: header
was provided to point to the new location.
- exception RedirectLimit
-
The maximum number of redirections was reached without coming to a final URI.
- exception ServerNotFoundError
-
Unable to resolve the host name given.
- exception RelativeURIError
-
A relative, as opposed to an absolute URI, was passed into request().
- exception FailedToDecompressContent
-
The headers claimed that the content of the response was compressed but the
decompression algorithm applied to the content failed.
- exception UnimplementedDigestAuthOptionError
-
The server requested a type of Digest authentication that we
are unfamiliar with.
- exception UnimplementedHmacDigestAuthOptionError
-
The server requested a type of HMACDigest authentication that we
are unfamiliar with.
| class Http( |
[cache=None], [timeout=None], [proxy_info=None]) |
-
The class that represents a client HTTP interface.
The cache parameter is either the name of a directory
to be used as a flat file cache, or it must an object that
implements the required caching interface.
The timeout parameter is the socket level timeout.
The proxy_info is an instance of ProxyInfo and is supplied
if a proxy is to be used. Note that the Socksipy module must be
installed for proxy support to work.
-
Response is a subclass of dict and instances of this
class are returned from calls
to Http.request. The info parameter is either
an rfc822.Message or an httplib.HTTPResponse object.
| class FileCache( |
dir_name, [safe=safename]) |
-
FileCache implements a Cache as a directory of files.
The dir_name parameter is
the name of the directory to use. If the directory does
not exist then FileCache attempts to create the directory.
The optional safe parameter is a funtion which generates
the cache filename for each URI. A FileCache object is
constructed and used for caching when you pass a directory name
into the constructor of Http.
| class ProxyInfo( |
proxy_type, proxy_host, proxy_port, [proxy_rdns=None], [proxy_user=None], [proxy_pass=None]) |
-
The parameter proxy_type must be set to one of socks.PROXY_TYPE_XXX
constants. The proxy_host and proxy_port must be set to the location
of the proxy. The optional proxy_rdns should be set to True if
the DNS server on the proxy should be used. The proxy_user and
proxy_pass are supplied when the proxy is protected by authentication.
Release 0.3, documentation updated on Mar 8, 2007.
