18.6.22 Examples

This example gets the python.org main page and displays the first 100 bytes of it:

>>> import urllib2
>>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
>>> print f.read(100)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<?xml-stylesheet href="./css/ht2html

Here we are sending a data-stream to the stdin of a CGI and reading the data it returns to us. Note that this example will only work when the Python installation supports SSL.

>>> import urllib2
>>> req = urllib2.Request(url='https://localhost/cgi-bin/test.cgi',
...                       data='This data is passed to stdin of the CGI')
>>> f = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>>> print f.read()
Got Data: "This data is passed to stdin of the CGI"

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
data = sys.stdin.read()
print 'Content-type: text-plain\n\nGot Data: "%s"' % data

import urllib2
# Create an OpenerDirector with support for Basic HTTP Authentication...
auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password('realm', 'host', 'username', 'password')
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_handler)
# ...and install it globally so it can be used with urlopen.
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/login.html')

build_opener() provides many handlers by default, including a ProxyHandler. By default, ProxyHandler uses the environment variables named <scheme>_proxy, where <scheme> is the URL scheme involved. For example, the http_proxy environment variable is read to obtain the HTTP proxy's URL.

This example replaces the default ProxyHandler with one that uses programatically-supplied proxy URLs, and adds proxy authorization support with ProxyBasicAuthHandler.

proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': 'http://www.example.com:3128/'})
proxy_auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
proxy_auth_handler.add_password('realm', 'host', 'username', 'password')

opener = build_opener(proxy_handler, proxy_auth_handler)
# This time, rather than install the OpenerDirector, we use it directly:
opener.open('http://www.example.com/login.html')

import urllib2
req = urllib2.Request('http://www.example.com/')
req.add_header('Referer', 'http://www.python.org/')
r = urllib2.urlopen(req)

OpenerDirector automatically adds a User-Agent: header to every Request. To change this:

import urllib2
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
opener.open('http://www.example.com/')

Also, remember that a few standard headers (Content-Length:, Content-Type: and Host:) are added when the Request is passed to urlopen() (or OpenerDirector.open()).