Making a POST call instead of GET using urllib2

Question

Do it in stages, and modify the object, like this:

# make a string with the request type in it:
method = "POST"
# create a handler. you can specify different handlers here (file uploads etc)
# but we go for the default
handler = urllib2.HTTPHandler()
# create an openerdirector instance
opener = urllib2.build_opener(handler)
# build a request
data = urllib.urlencode(dictionary_of_POST_fields_or_None)
request = urllib2.Request(url, data=data)
# add any other information you want
request.add_header("Content-Type",'application/json')
# overload the get method function with a small anonymous function...
request.get_method = lambda: method
# try it; don't forget to catch the result
try:
    connection = opener.open(request)
except urllib2.HTTPError,e:
    connection = e

# check. Substitute with appropriate HTTP code.
if connection.code == 200:
    data = connection.read()
else:
    # handle the error case. connection.read() will still contain data
    # if any was returned, but it probably won't be of any use

This way allows you to extend to making PUT, DELETE, HEAD and OPTIONS requests too, simply by substituting the value of method or even wrapping it up in a function. Depending on what you're trying to do, you may also need a different HTTP handler, e.g. for multi file upload.

This may have been answered before: Python URLLib / URLLib2 POST.

Your server is likely performing a 302 redirect from http://myserver/post_service to http://myserver/post_service/. When the 302 redirect is performed, the request changes from POST to GET (see Issue 1401). Try changing url to http://myserver/post_service/.

Have a read of the urllib Missing Manual. Pulled from there is the following simple example of a POST request.

url = 'http://myserver/post_service'
data = urllib.urlencode({'name' : 'joe', 'age'  : '10'})
req = urllib2.Request(url, data)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
print response.read()

As suggested by @Michael Kent do consider requests, it's great.

EDIT: This said, I do not know why passing data to urlopen() does not result in a POST request; It should. I suspect your server is redirecting, or misbehaving.

The requests module may ease your pain.

url = 'http://myserver/post_service'
data = dict(name='joe', age='10')

r = requests.post(url, data=data, allow_redirects=True)
print r.content