20.5.1. Request Objects

The following methods describe Request‘s public interface, and so all may be overridden in subclasses. It also defines several public attributes that can be used by clients to inspect the parsed request.

Request.full_url

The original URL passed to the constructor.

Request.type

The URI scheme.

Request.host

The URI authority, typically a host, but may also contain a port separated by a colon.

Request.origin_req_host

The original host for the request, without port.

Request.selector

The URI path. If the Request uses a proxy, then selector will be the full url that is passed to the proxy.

Request.data

The entity body for the request, or None if not specified.

Request.unverifiable

boolean, indicates whether the request is unverifiable as defined by RFC 2965.

Request.add_data(data)

Set the Request data to data. This is ignored by all handlers except HTTP handlers — and there it should be a byte string, and will change the request to be POST rather than GET.

Request.get_method()

Return a string indicating the HTTP request method. This is only meaningful for HTTP requests, and currently always returns 'GET' or 'POST'.

Request.has_data()

Return whether the instance has a non-None data.

Request.get_data()

Return the instance’s data.

Request.add_header(key, val)

Add another header to the request. Headers are currently ignored by all handlers except HTTP handlers, where they are added to the list of headers sent to the server. Note that there cannot be more than one header with the same name, and later calls will overwrite previous calls in case the key collides. Currently, this is no loss of HTTP functionality, since all headers which have meaning when used more than once have a (header-specific) way of gaining the same functionality using only one header.

Request.add_unredirected_header(key, header)

Add a header that will not be added to a redirected request.

Request.has_header(header)

Return whether the instance has the named header (checks both regular and unredirected).

Request.get_full_url()

Return the URL given in the constructor.

Request.get_type()

Return the type of the URL — also known as the scheme.

Request.get_host()

Return the host to which a connection will be made.

Request.get_selector()

Return the selector — the part of the URL that is sent to the server.

Request.set_proxy(host, type)

Prepare the request by connecting to a proxy server. The host and type will replace those of the instance, and the instance’s selector will be the original URL given in the constructor.

Request.get_origin_req_host()

Return the request-host of the origin transaction, as defined by RFC 2965. See the documentation for the Request constructor.

Request.is_unverifiable()

Return whether the request is unverifiable, as defined by RFC 2965. See the documentation for the Request constructor.

20.5.2. OpenerDirector Objects

OpenerDirector instances have the following methods:

OpenerDirector.add_handler(handler)

handler should be an instance of BaseHandler. The following methods are searched, and added to the possible chains (note that HTTP errors are a special case).

• protocol_open() — signal that the handler knows how to open protocol URLs.
• http_error_type() — signal that the handler knows how to handle HTTP errors with HTTP error code type.
• protocol_error() — signal that the handler knows how to handle errors from (non-http) protocol.
• protocol_request() — signal that the handler knows how to pre-process protocol requests.
• protocol_response() — signal that the handler knows how to post-process protocol responses.

OpenerDirector.open(url, data=None[, timeout])

Open the given url (which can be a request object or a string), optionally passing the given data. Arguments, return values and exceptions raised are the same as those of urlopen() (which simply calls the open() method on the currently installed global OpenerDirector). 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). The timeout feature actually works only for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP connections).

OpenerDirector.error(proto, *args)

Handle an error of the given protocol. This will call the registered error handlers for the given protocol with the given arguments (which are protocol specific). The HTTP protocol is a special case which uses the HTTP response code to determine the specific error handler; refer to the http_error_*() methods of the handler classes.

Return values and exceptions raised are the same as those of urlopen().

OpenerDirector objects open URLs in three stages:

The order in which these methods are called within each stage is determined by sorting the handler instances.

1. Every handler with a method named like protocol_request() has that method called to pre-process the request.

2. Handlers with a method named like protocol_open() are called to handle the request. This stage ends when a handler either returns a non-None value (ie. a response), or raises an exception (usually URLError). Exceptions are allowed to propagate.

   In fact, the above algorithm is first tried for methods named default_open(). If all such methods return None, the algorithm is repeated for methods named like protocol_open(). If all such methods return None, the algorithm is repeated for methods named unknown_open().

   Note that the implementation of these methods may involve calls of the parent OpenerDirector instance’s open() and error() methods.

3. Every handler with a method named like protocol_response() has that method called to post-process the response.

20.5.3. BaseHandler Objects

BaseHandler objects provide a couple of methods that are directly useful, and others that are meant to be used by derived classes. These are intended for direct use:

BaseHandler.add_parent(director)

Add a director as parent.

BaseHandler.close()

Remove any parents.

The following members and methods should only be used by classes derived from BaseHandler.

BaseHandler.parent

A valid OpenerDirector, which can be used to open using a different protocol, or handle errors.

BaseHandler.default_open(req)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should define it if they want to catch all URLs.

This method, if implemented, will be called by the parent OpenerDirector. It should return a file-like object as described in the return value of the open() of OpenerDirector, or None. It should raise URLError, unless a truly exceptional thing happens (for example, MemoryError should not be mapped to URLError).

This method will be called before any protocol-specific open method.

BaseHandler.protocol_open(req)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should define it if they want to handle URLs with the given protocol.

This method, if defined, will be called by the parent OpenerDirector. Return values should be the same as for default_open().

BaseHandler.unknown_open(req)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should define it if they want to catch all URLs with no specific registered handler to open it.

This method, if implemented, will be called by the parent OpenerDirector. Return values should be the same as for default_open().

BaseHandler.http_error_default(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should override it if they intend to provide a catch-all for otherwise unhandled HTTP errors. It will be called automatically by the OpenerDirector getting the error, and should not normally be called in other circumstances.

req will be a Request object, fp will be a file-like object with the HTTP error body, code will be the three-digit code of the error, msg will be the user-visible explanation of the code and hdrs will be a mapping object with the headers of the error.

Return values and exceptions raised should be the same as those of urlopen().

BaseHandler.http_error_nnn(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

nnn should be a three-digit HTTP error code. This method is also not defined in BaseHandler, but will be called, if it exists, on an instance of a subclass, when an HTTP error with code nnn occurs.

Subclasses should override this method to handle specific HTTP errors.

Arguments, return values and exceptions raised should be the same as for http_error_default().

BaseHandler.protocol_request(req)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should define it if they want to pre-process requests of the given protocol.

This method, if defined, will be called by the parent OpenerDirector. req will be a Request object. The return value should be a Request object.

BaseHandler.protocol_response(req, response)

This method is not defined in BaseHandler, but subclasses should define it if they want to post-process responses of the given protocol.

This method, if defined, will be called by the parent OpenerDirector. req will be a Request object. response will be an object implementing the same interface as the return value of urlopen(). The return value should implement the same interface as the return value of urlopen().

20.5.4. HTTPRedirectHandler Objects

HTTPRedirectHandler.redirect_request(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs, newurl)

Return a Request or None in response to a redirect. This is called by the default implementations of the http_error_30*() methods when a redirection is received from the server. If a redirection should take place, return a new Request to allow http_error_30*() to perform the redirect to newurl. Otherwise, raise HTTPError if no other handler should try to handle this URL, or return None if you can’t but another handler might.

Note

The default implementation of this method does not strictly follow RFC 2616, which says that 301 and 302 responses to POST requests must not be automatically redirected without confirmation by the user. In reality, browsers do allow automatic redirection of these responses, changing the POST to a GET, and the default implementation reproduces this behavior.

HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_301(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

Redirect to the Location: or URI: URL. This method is called by the parent OpenerDirector when getting an HTTP ‘moved permanently’ response.

HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_302(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

The same as http_error_301(), but called for the ‘found’ response.

HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_303(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

The same as http_error_301(), but called for the ‘see other’ response.

HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_307(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

The same as http_error_301(), but called for the ‘temporary redirect’ response.

20.5.5. HTTPCookieProcessor Objects

HTTPCookieProcessor instances have one attribute:

HTTPCookieProcessor.cookiejar

The http.cookiejar.CookieJar in which cookies are stored.

20.5.6. ProxyHandler Objects

ProxyHandler.protocol_open(request)

The ProxyHandler will have a method protocol_open() for every protocol which has a proxy in the proxies dictionary given in the constructor. The method will modify requests to go through the proxy, by calling request.set_proxy(), and call the next handler in the chain to actually execute the protocol.

20.5.7. HTTPPasswordMgr Objects

These methods are available on HTTPPasswordMgr and HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm objects.

HTTPPasswordMgr.add_password(realm, uri, user, passwd)

uri can be either a single URI, or a sequence of URIs. realm, user and passwd must be strings. This causes (user, passwd) to be used as authentication tokens when authentication for realm and a super-URI of any of the given URIs is given.

HTTPPasswordMgr.find_user_password(realm, authuri)

Get user/password for given realm and URI, if any. This method will return (None, None) if there is no matching user/password.

For HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm objects, the realm None will be searched if the given realm has no matching user/password.

20.5.8. AbstractBasicAuthHandler Objects

AbstractBasicAuthHandler.http_error_auth_reqed(authreq, host, req, headers)

Handle an authentication request by getting a user/password pair, and re-trying the request. authreq should be the name of the header where the information about the realm is included in the request, host specifies the URL and path to authenticate for, req should be the (failed) Request object, and headers should be the error headers.

host is either an authority (e.g. "python.org") or a URL containing an authority component (e.g. "http://python.org/"). In either case, the authority must not contain a userinfo component (so, "python.org" and "python.org:80" are fine, "joe:[email protected]" is not).

20.5.9. HTTPBasicAuthHandler Objects

HTTPBasicAuthHandler.http_error_401(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

Retry the request with authentication information, if available.

20.5.10. ProxyBasicAuthHandler Objects

ProxyBasicAuthHandler.http_error_407(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

Retry the request with authentication information, if available.

20.5.11. AbstractDigestAuthHandler Objects

AbstractDigestAuthHandler.http_error_auth_reqed(authreq, host, req, headers)

authreq should be the name of the header where the information about the realm is included in the request, host should be the host to authenticate to, req should be the (failed) Request object, and headers should be the error headers.

20.5.12. HTTPDigestAuthHandler Objects

HTTPDigestAuthHandler.http_error_401(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

Retry the request with authentication information, if available.

20.5.13. ProxyDigestAuthHandler Objects

ProxyDigestAuthHandler.http_error_407(req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)

Retry the request with authentication information, if available.

20.5.14. HTTPHandler Objects

HTTPHandler.http_open(req)

Send an HTTP request, which can be either GET or POST, depending on req.has_data().

20.5.15. HTTPSHandler Objects

HTTPSHandler.https_open(req)

Send an HTTPS request, which can be either GET or POST, depending on req.has_data().

20.5.16. FileHandler Objects

FileHandler.file_open(req)

Open the file locally, if there is no host name, or the host name is 'localhost'.

This method is applicable only for local hostnames. When a remote hostname is given, an URLError is raised.

Changed in version 3.2.

20.5.17. FTPHandler Objects

FTPHandler.ftp_open(req)

Open the FTP file indicated by req. The login is always done with empty username and password.

20.5.18. CacheFTPHandler Objects

CacheFTPHandler objects are FTPHandler objects with the following additional methods:

CacheFTPHandler.setTimeout(t)

Set timeout of connections to t seconds.

CacheFTPHandler.setMaxConns(m)

Set maximum number of cached connections to m.

20.5.19. UnknownHandler Objects

UnknownHandler.unknown_open()

Raise a URLError exception.

20.5.20. HTTPErrorProcessor Objects

HTTPErrorProcessor.unknown_open()

Process HTTP error responses.

For 200 error codes, the response object is returned immediately.

For non-200 error codes, this simply passes the job on to the protocol_error_code() handler methods, via OpenerDirector.error(). Eventually, HTTPDefaultErrorHandler will raise an HTTPError if no other handler handles the error.

20.5.21. Examples

This example gets the python.org main page and displays the first 300 bytes of it.

>>> import urllib.request
>>> f = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
>>> print(f.read(300))
b'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">\n\n\n<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">\n\n<head>\n
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />\n
<title>Python Programming '

Note that urlopen returns a bytes object. This is because there is no way for urlopen to automatically determine the encoding of the byte stream it receives from the http server. In general, a program will decode the returned bytes object to string once it determines or guesses the appropriate encoding.

The following W3C document, http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset , lists the various ways in which a (X)HTML or a XML document could have specified its encoding information.

As python.org website uses utf-8 encoding as specified in it’s meta tag, we will use same for decoding the bytes object.

>>> import urllib.request
>>> f = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
>>> print(f.read(100).decode('utf-8'))
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtm

In the following example, 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 urllib.request
>>> req = urllib.request.Request(url='https://localhost/cgi-bin/test.cgi',
...                       data=b'This data is passed to stdin of the CGI')
>>> f = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
>>> print(f.read().decode('utf-8'))
Got Data: "This data is passed to stdin of the CGI"

The code for the sample CGI used in the above example is:

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

Use of Basic HTTP Authentication:

import urllib.request
# Create an OpenerDirector with support for Basic HTTP Authentication...
auth_handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password(realm='PDQ Application',
                          uri='https://mahler:8092/site-updates.py',
                          user='klem',
                          passwd='kadidd!ehopper')
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(auth_handler)
# ...and install it globally so it can be used with urlopen.
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
urllib.request.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 programmatically-supplied proxy URLs, and adds proxy authorization support with ProxyBasicAuthHandler.

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

opener = urllib.request.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')

Adding HTTP headers:

Use the headers argument to the Request constructor, or:

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

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

import urllib.request
opener = urllib.request.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()).

Here is an example session that uses the GET method to retrieve a URL containing parameters:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> import urllib.parse
>>> params = urllib.parse.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
>>> f = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/query?%s" % params)
>>> print(f.read().decode('utf-8'))

The following example uses the POST method instead. Note that params output from urlencode is encoded to bytes before it is sent to urlopen as data:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> import urllib.parse
>>> params = urllib.parse.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
>>> params = params.encode('utf-8')
>>> f = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/query", params)
>>> print(f.read().decode('utf-8'))

The following example uses an explicitly specified HTTP proxy, overriding environment settings:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> proxies = {'http': 'http://proxy.example.com:8080/'}
>>> opener = urllib.request.FancyURLopener(proxies)
>>> f = opener.open("http://www.python.org")
>>> f.read().decode('utf-8')

The following example uses no proxies at all, overriding environment settings:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> opener = urllib.request.FancyURLopener({})
>>> f = opener.open("http://www.python.org/")
>>> f.read().decode('utf-8')

20.5.22. Legacy interface

The following functions and classes are ported from the Python 2 module urllib (as opposed to urllib2). They might become deprecated at some point in the future.

urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename=None, reporthook=None, data=None)

Copy a network object denoted by a URL to a local file, if necessary. If the URL points to a local file, or a valid cached copy of the object exists, the object is not copied. Return a tuple (filename, headers) where filename is the local file name under which the object can be found, and headers is whatever the info() method of the object returned by urlopen() returned (for a remote object, possibly cached). Exceptions are the same as for urlopen().

The second argument, if present, specifies the file location to copy to (if absent, the location will be a tempfile with a generated name). The third argument, if present, is a hook function that will be called once on establishment of the network connection and once after each block read thereafter. The hook will be passed three arguments; a count of blocks transferred so far, a block size in bytes, and the total size of the file. The third argument may be -1 on older FTP servers which do not return a file size in response to a retrieval request.

If the url uses the http: scheme identifier, the optional data argument may be given to specify a POST request (normally the request type is GET). The data argument must in standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded format; see the urlencode() function below.

urlretrieve() will raise ContentTooShortError when it detects that the amount of data available was less than the expected amount (which is the size reported by a Content-Length header). This can occur, for example, when the download is interrupted.

The Content-Length is treated as a lower bound: if there’s more data to read, urlretrieve() reads more data, but if less data is available, it raises the exception.

You can still retrieve the downloaded data in this case, it is stored in the content attribute of the exception instance.

If no Content-Length header was supplied, urlretrieve() can not check the size of the data it has downloaded, and just returns it. In this case you just have to assume that the download was successful.

urllib.request.urlcleanup()

Clear the cache that may have been built up by previous calls to urlretrieve().

class urllib.request.URLopener(proxies=None, **x509)

Base class for opening and reading URLs. Unless you need to support opening objects using schemes other than http:, ftp:, or file:, you probably want to use FancyURLopener.

By default, the URLopener class sends a User-Agent header of urllib/VVV, where VVV is the urllib version number. Applications can define their own User-Agent header by subclassing URLopener or FancyURLopener and setting the class attribute version to an appropriate string value in the subclass definition.

The optional proxies parameter should be a dictionary mapping scheme names to proxy URLs, where an empty dictionary turns proxies off completely. Its default value is None, in which case environmental proxy settings will be used if present, as discussed in the definition of urlopen(), above.

Additional keyword parameters, collected in x509, may be used for authentication of the client when using the https: scheme. The keywords key_file and cert_file are supported to provide an SSL key and certificate; both are needed to support client authentication.

URLopener objects will raise an IOError exception if the server returns an error code.

open(fullurl, data=None)

Open fullurl using the appropriate protocol. This method sets up cache and proxy information, then calls the appropriate open method with its input arguments. If the scheme is not recognized, open_unknown() is called. The data argument has the same meaning as the data argument of urlopen().

open_unknown(fullurl, data=None)

Overridable interface to open unknown URL types.

retrieve(url, filename=None, reporthook=None, data=None)

Retrieves the contents of url and places it in filename. The return value is a tuple consisting of a local filename and either a email.message.Message object containing the response headers (for remote URLs) or None (for local URLs). The caller must then open and read the contents of filename. If filename is not given and the URL refers to a local file, the input filename is returned. If the URL is non-local and filename is not given, the filename is the output of tempfile.mktemp() with a suffix that matches the suffix of the last path component of the input URL. If reporthook is given, it must be a function accepting three numeric parameters. It will be called after each chunk of data is read from the network. reporthook is ignored for local URLs.

If the url uses the http: scheme identifier, the optional data argument may be given to specify a POST request (normally the request type is GET). The data argument must in standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded format; see the urlencode() function below.

version

Variable that specifies the user agent of the opener object. To get urllib to tell servers that it is a particular user agent, set this in a subclass as a class variable or in the constructor before calling the base constructor.

class urllib.request.FancyURLopener(...)

FancyURLopener subclasses URLopener providing default handling for the following HTTP response codes: 301, 302, 303, 307 and 401. For the 30x response codes listed above, the Location header is used to fetch the actual URL. For 401 response codes (authentication required), basic HTTP authentication is performed. For the 30x response codes, recursion is bounded by the value of the maxtries attribute, which defaults to 10.

For all other response codes, the method http_error_default() is called which you can override in subclasses to handle the error appropriately.

Note

According to the letter of RFC 2616, 301 and 302 responses to POST requests must not be automatically redirected without confirmation by the user. In reality, browsers do allow automatic redirection of these responses, changing the POST to a GET, and urllib reproduces this behaviour.

The parameters to the constructor are the same as those for URLopener.

Note

When performing basic authentication, a FancyURLopener instance calls its prompt_user_passwd() method. The default implementation asks the users for the required information on the controlling terminal. A subclass may override this method to support more appropriate behavior if needed.

The FancyURLopener class offers one additional method that should be overloaded to provide the appropriate behavior:

prompt_user_passwd(host, realm)

Return information needed to authenticate the user at the given host in the specified security realm. The return value should be a tuple, (user, password), which can be used for basic authentication.

The implementation prompts for this information on the terminal; an application should override this method to use an appropriate interaction model in the local environment.

20.5.23. urllib.request Restrictions

• Currently, only the following protocols are supported: HTTP, (versions 0.9 and 1.0), FTP, and local files.

• The caching feature of urlretrieve() has been disabled until I find the time to hack proper processing of Expiration time headers.

• There should be a function to query whether a particular URL is in the cache.

• For backward compatibility, if a URL appears to point to a local file but the file can’t be opened, the URL is re-interpreted using the FTP protocol. This can sometimes cause confusing error messages.

• The urlopen() and urlretrieve() functions can cause arbitrarily long delays while waiting for a network connection to be set up. This means that it is difficult to build an interactive Web client using these functions without using threads.

• The data returned by urlopen() or urlretrieve() is the raw data returned by the server. This may be binary data (such as an image), plain text or (for example) HTML. The HTTP protocol provides type information in the reply header, which can be inspected by looking at the Content-Type header. If the returned data is HTML, you can use the module html.parser to parse it.

• The code handling the FTP protocol cannot differentiate between a file and a directory. This can lead to unexpected behavior when attempting to read a URL that points to a file that is not accessible. If the URL ends in a /, it is assumed to refer to a directory and will be handled accordingly. But if an attempt to read a file leads to a 550 error (meaning the URL cannot be found or is not accessible, often for permission reasons), then the path is treated as a directory in order to handle the case when a directory is specified by a URL but the trailing / has been left off. This can cause misleading results when you try to fetch a file whose read permissions make it inaccessible; the FTP code will try to read it, fail with a 550 error, and then perform a directory listing for the unreadable file. If fine-grained control is needed, consider using the ftplib module, subclassing FancyURLopener, or changing _urlopener to meet your needs.