This is a gut reaction to the wealth of ways to parse URLs, MIME headers, HTTP messages and other things described by IETF RFCs. They range from the Python standard library (urllib) to be buried in the guts of other kitchen sink libraries (werkzeug) and most of them are broken in one way or the other.
So why create another one? Good question... glad that you asked. This is a companion library to the great packages out there that are responsible for communicating with other systems. I'm going to concentrate on providing a crisp and usable set of APIs that concentrate on parsing text. Nothing more. Hopefully by concentrating on the specific task of parsing things, the result will be a beautiful and usable interface to the text strings that power the Internet world.
Here's a sample of the code that this library lets you write:
from ietfparse import algorithms, headers
def negotiate_versioned_representation(request, handler, data_dict):
requested = headers.parse_accept(request.headers['Accept'])
selected = algorithms.select_content_type(requested, [
headers.parse_content_type('application/example+json; v=1'),
headers.parse_content_type('application/example+json; v=2'),
headers.parse_content_type('application/json'),
])
output_version = selected.parameters.get('v', '2')
if output_version == '1':
handler.set_header('Content-Type', 'application/example+json; v=1')
handler.write(generate_legacy_json(data_dict))
else:
handler.set_header('Content-Type', 'application/example+json; v=2')
handler.write(generate_modern_json(data_dict))