HTTP 1

HTTP1 is a wrapper around httplib to perform HTTP requests in a single call. For instance, to get PyPI index of packages, you might write:

import http1

print http1.request('http://pypi.python.org/simple/').body

Works on both Python 2 and 3 (was tested on 2.7.10 and 3.4.3).

request() method

This method performs an HTTP request. The signature of the request method is the following:

request(url, params={}, method='GET', body=None, headers={},
        content_type=None, content_length=True, username=None,
        password=None, capitalize_headers=True,
        follow_redirect=True, max_redirect=3)

The parameters are the following:

• url: the URL call, including protocol and parameters (such as http://www.google.com?foo=1&bar=2).
• params: URL parameters as a map, so that {'foo': 1, 'bar': 2} will result in an URL ending with ?foo=1&bar=2.
• method: the HTTP method (such as GET or POST). Defaults to GET.
• body: the body of the request as a string. Defaults to None.
• headers: request headers as a dictionnary. Defaults to {}.
• content_type: the content type header of the request. Defauls to None.
• content_length: tells if we should add content length headers to the request. Defaults to True.
• username: username while performing basic authentication, must be set with password.
• password: password while performing basic authentication, must be set with username.
• capitalize_headers: tells if headers should be capitalized (so that their names are all like Content-Type for instance).
• follow_redirect: tells if http1 should follow redirections (status codes 3xx). Defaults to True.
• max_redirect: maximum number of redirections to follow. If there are too many redirects, a TooManyRedirectsException is raised. Defaults to 3.

This method returns the response as a Response object described hereafter.

May raise a TooManyRedirectsException.

NOTE: to call HTTPS URLs, Python must have been built with SSL support.

There are dedicated functions for HTTP methods (GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS and TRACE). Thus, to perform a head call for instance, you may write:

response = http1.head('http://www.example.com')

Which is the same as:

response = http1.request('http://www.example.com', method='HEAD')

Response object

This object encapsulates status code (200, 404, as an integer), message (such as OK, Not Found, as a string), headers (as a dictionnary), and body (as a string).

TooManyRedirectsException

This exception is thrown when there have been too many redirects (that is a number of refirects greater than max_redirect).

Enjoy!