python urllib2

Note

 

The urllib2 module has been split across several modules in Python 3 named urllib.request and urllib.error. The 2to3 tool will automatically adapt imports when converting your sources to Python 3.

The urllib2 module defines functions and classes which help in opening URLs (mostly HTTP) in a complex world — basic and digest authentication, redirections, cookies and more.

See also

 

The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface.

The urllib2 module defines the following functions:

urllib2.urlopen(url[, data[, timeout[, cafile[, capath[, cadefault[, context]]]]])

Open the URL url, which can be either a string or a Request object.

data may be a string specifying additional data to send to the server, or None if no such data is needed. Currently HTTP requests are the only ones that use data; the HTTP request will be a POST instead of a GET when the data parameter is provided. data should be a buffer in the standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded format. The urllib.urlencode() function takes a mapping or sequence of 2-tuples and returns a string in this format. urllib2 module sends HTTP/1.1 requests with Connection:close header included.

The optional timeout parameter specifies a timeout in seconds for blocking operations like the connection attempt (if not specified, the global default timeout setting will be used). This actually only works for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP connections.

If context is specified, it must be a ssl.SSLContext instance describing the various SSL options. See HTTPSConnection for more details.

The optional cafile and capath parameters specify a set of trusted CA certificates for HTTPS requests. cafile should point to a single file containing a bundle of CA certificates, whereas capath should point to a directory of hashed certificate files. More information can be found in ssl.SSLContext.load_verify_locations().

The cadefault parameter is ignored.

This function returns a file-like object with three additional methods:

• geturl() — return the URL of the resource retrieved, commonly used to determine if a redirect was followed
• info() — return the meta-information of the page, such as headers, in the form of an mimetools.Message instance (see Quick Reference to HTTP Headers)
• getcode() — return the HTTP status code of the response.

Raises URLError on errors.

Note that None may be returned if no handler handles the request (though the default installed global OpenerDirector uses UnknownHandler to ensure this never happens).

In addition, if proxy settings are detected (for example, when a *_proxy environment variable like  was added.