In Python, what are the differences between the urllib
, urllib2
, urllib3
and requests
modules? Why are there three? They seem to do the same thing...
2) urllib provides the urlencode method which is used for the generation of GET query strings, urllib2 doesn't have such a function. This is one of the reasons why urllib is often used along with urllib2. Requests - Requests' is a simple, easy-to-use HTTP library written in Python.
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.
httplib and httplib2 handles HTTP/HTTPs request and response directly and give you more space to do your own job. urllib and urllib2 are build upon httplib, they are more abstract and powerful, but sometimes won't fulfill your specified need about some HTTP related operations.
The urllib. request module defines functions and classes which help in opening URLs (mostly HTTP) in a complex world — basic and digest authentication, redirections, cookies and more. The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface.
I know it's been said already, but I'd highly recommend the requests
Python package.
If you've used languages other than python, you're probably thinking urllib
and urllib2
are easy to use, not much code, and highly capable, that's how I used to think. But the requests
package is so unbelievably useful and short that everyone should be using it.
First, it supports a fully restful API, and is as easy as:
import requests resp = requests.get('http://www.mywebsite.com/user') resp = requests.post('http://www.mywebsite.com/user') resp = requests.put('http://www.mywebsite.com/user/put') resp = requests.delete('http://www.mywebsite.com/user/delete')
Regardless of whether GET / POST, you never have to encode parameters again, it simply takes a dictionary as an argument and is good to go:
userdata = {"firstname": "John", "lastname": "Doe", "password": "jdoe123"} resp = requests.post('http://www.mywebsite.com/user', data=userdata)
Plus it even has a built in JSON decoder (again, I know json.loads()
isn't a lot more to write, but this sure is convenient):
resp.json()
Or if your response data is just text, use:
resp.text
This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the list of features from the requests site:
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