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When would someone use httplib and when urllib?
What are the differences?
I think I ready urllib uses httplib, I am planning to make an app that will need to make http request and so far I only used httplib.HTTPConnection in python for requests, and reading about urllib I see I can use that for request too, so whats the benefit of one or the other?
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True, if you want to avoid adding any dependencies, urllib is available. But note that even the Python official documentation recommends the requests library: "The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface."
I found that time took to send the data from the client to the server took same time for both modules (urllib, requests) but the time it took to return data from the server to the client is more then twice faster in urllib compare to request.
Urllib package is the URL handling module for python. It is used to fetch URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). It uses the urlopen function and is able to fetch URLs using a variety of different protocols.
Source code: Lib/httplib.py. This module defines classes which implement the client side of the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It is normally not used directly — the module urllib uses it to handle URLs that use HTTP and HTTPS. HTTPS support is only available if the socket module was compiled with SSL support.
urllib (particularly urllib2) handles many things by default or has appropriate libs to do so. For example, urllib2 will follow redirects automatically and you can use cookiejar to handle login scripts. These are all things you'd have to code yourself if you were using httplib.
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