Chapter 12. The Internet

The Internet is a pervasive aspect of modern computing. Even small, single-use scripts frequently interact with remote services to send or receive data. Python’s rich set of tools for working with web protocols makes it well suited for programming web-based applications, either as a client or a server.

The urlparse module manipulates URL strings, splitting and combining their components, and is useful in clients and servers.

There are two client-side APIs for accessing web resources. The original urllib and updated urllib2 offer similar APIs for retrieving content remotely, but urllib2 is easier to extend with new protocols and the urllib2.Request provides a way to add custom headers to outgoing requests.

HTTP POST requests ...

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