Python - Example of urllib2 asynchronous / threaded request using HTTPS

Question

I'm having a heck of a time getting asynchronous / threaded HTTPS requests to work using Python's urllib2.

Does anyone out there have a basic example that implements urllib2.Request, urllib2.build_opener and a subclass of urllib2.HTTPSHandler?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The code below does 7 http requests asynchronously at the same time. It does not use threads, instead it uses asynchronous networking with the twisted library.

from twisted.web import client
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer

urls = [
 'http://www.python.org', 
 'http://stackoverflow.com', 
 'http://www.twistedmatrix.com', 
 'http://www.google.com',
 'http://launchpad.net',
 'http://github.com',
 'http://bitbucket.org',
]

def finish(results):
    for result in results:
        print 'GOT PAGE', len(result), 'bytes'
    reactor.stop()

waiting = [client.getPage(url) for url in urls]
defer.gatherResults(waiting).addCallback(finish)

reactor.run()

Answer 2

there's a really simple way, involving a handler for urllib2, which you can find here: http://pythonquirks.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/asynchronous-http-request.html

#!/usr/bin/env python

import urllib2
import threading

class MyHandler(urllib2.HTTPHandler):
    def http_response(self, req, response):
        print "url: %s" % (response.geturl(),)
        print "info: %s" % (response.info(),)
        for l in response:
            print l
        return response

o = urllib2.build_opener(MyHandler())
t = threading.Thread(target=o.open, args=('http://www.google.com/',))
t.start()
print "I'm asynchronous!"

t.join()

print "I've ended!"