
``urllib`` --- Open arbitrary resources by URL
**********************************************

Note: The ``urllib`` module has been split into parts and renamed in
  Python 3.0 to ``urllib.request``, ``urllib.parse``, and
  ``urllib.error``. The *2to3* tool will automatically adapt imports
  when converting your sources to 3.0. Also note that the
  ``urllib.urlopen()`` function has been removed in Python 3.0 in
  favor of ``urllib2.urlopen()``.

This module provides a high-level interface for fetching data across
the World Wide Web.  In particular, the ``urlopen()`` function is
similar to the built-in function ``open()``, but accepts Universal
Resource Locators (URLs) instead of filenames.  Some restrictions
apply --- it can only open URLs for reading, and no seek operations
are available.


High-level interface
====================

urllib.urlopen(url[, data[, proxies]])

   Open a network object denoted by a URL for reading.  If the URL
   does not have a scheme identifier, or if it has ``file:`` as its
   scheme identifier, this opens a local file (without universal
   newlines); otherwise it opens a socket to a server somewhere on the
   network.  If the connection cannot be made the ``IOError``
   exception is raised.  If all went well, a file-like object is
   returned.  This supports the following methods: ``read()``,
   ``readline()``, ``readlines()``, ``fileno()``, ``close()``,
   ``info()``, ``getcode()`` and ``geturl()``.  It also has proper
   support for the *iterator* protocol. One caveat: the ``read()``
   method, if the size argument is omitted or negative, may not read
   until the end of the data stream; there is no good way to determine
   that the entire stream from a socket has been read in the general
   case.

   Except for the ``info()``, ``getcode()`` and ``geturl()`` methods,
   these methods have the same interface as for file objects --- see
   section *File Objects* in this manual.  (It is not a built-in file
   object, however, so it can't be used at those few places where a
   true built-in file object is required.)

   The ``info()`` method returns an instance of the class
   ``mimetools.Message`` containing meta-information associated with
   the URL.  When the method is HTTP, these headers are those returned
   by the server at the head of the retrieved HTML page (including
   Content-Length and Content-Type).  When the method is FTP, a
   Content-Length header will be present if (as is now usual) the
   server passed back a file length in response to the FTP retrieval
   request. A Content-Type header will be present if the MIME type can
   be guessed.  When the method is local-file, returned headers will
   include a Date representing the file's last-modified time, a
   Content-Length giving file size, and a Content-Type containing a
   guess at the file's type. See also the description of the
   ``mimetools`` module.

   The ``geturl()`` method returns the real URL of the page.  In some
   cases, the HTTP server redirects a client to another URL.  The
   ``urlopen()`` function handles this transparently, but in some
   cases the caller needs to know which URL the client was redirected
   to.  The ``geturl()`` method can be used to get at this redirected
   URL.

   The ``getcode()`` method returns the HTTP status code that was sent
   with the response, or ``None`` if the URL is no HTTP URL.

   If the *url* uses the ``http:`` scheme identifier, the optional
   *data* argument may be given to specify a ``POST`` request
   (normally the request type is ``GET``).  The *data* argument must
   be in standard *application/x-www-form-urlencoded* format; see the
   ``urlencode()`` function below.

   The ``urlopen()`` function works transparently with proxies which
   do not require authentication.  In a Unix or Windows environment,
   set the **http_proxy**, or **ftp_proxy** environment variables to a
   URL that identifies the proxy server before starting the Python
   interpreter.  For example (the ``'%'`` is the command prompt):

      % http_proxy="http://www.someproxy.com:3128"
      % export http_proxy
      % python
      ...

   The **no_proxy** environment variable can be used to specify hosts
   which shouldn't be reached via proxy; if set, it should be a comma-
   separated list of hostname suffixes, optionally with ``:port``
   appended, for example ``cern.ch,ncsa.uiuc.edu,some.host:8080``.

   In a Windows environment, if no proxy environment variables are
   set, proxy settings are obtained from the registry's Internet
   Settings section.

   In a Mac OS X  environment, ``urlopen()`` will retrieve proxy
   information from the OS X System Configuration Framework, which can
   be managed with Network System Preferences panel.

   Alternatively, the optional *proxies* argument may be used to
   explicitly specify proxies.  It must be a dictionary mapping scheme
   names to proxy URLs, where an empty dictionary causes no proxies to
   be used, and ``None`` (the default value) causes environmental
   proxy settings to be used as discussed above.  For example:

      # Use http://www.someproxy.com:3128 for http proxying
      proxies = {'http': 'http://www.someproxy.com:3128'}
      filehandle = urllib.urlopen(some_url, proxies=proxies)
      # Don't use any proxies
      filehandle = urllib.urlopen(some_url, proxies={})
      # Use proxies from environment - both versions are equivalent
      filehandle = urllib.urlopen(some_url, proxies=None)
      filehandle = urllib.urlopen(some_url)

   Proxies which require authentication for use are not currently
   supported; this is considered an implementation limitation.

   Changed in version 2.3: Added the *proxies* support.

   Changed in version 2.6: Added ``getcode()`` to returned object and
   support for the **no_proxy** environment variable.

   Deprecated since version 2.6: The ``urlopen()`` function has been
   removed in Python 3.0 in favor of ``urllib2.urlopen()``.

urllib.urlretrieve(url[, filename[, reporthook[, data]]])

   Copy a network object denoted by a URL to a local file, if
   necessary. If the URL points to a local file, or a valid cached
   copy of the object exists, the object is not copied.  Return a
   tuple ``(filename, headers)`` where *filename* is the local file
   name under which the object can be found, and *headers* is whatever
   the ``info()`` method of the object returned by ``urlopen()``
   returned (for a remote object, possibly cached). Exceptions are the
   same as for ``urlopen()``.

   The second argument, if present, specifies the file location to
   copy to (if absent, the location will be a tempfile with a
   generated name). The third argument, if present, is a hook function
   that will be called once on establishment of the network connection
   and once after each block read thereafter.  The hook will be passed
   three arguments; a count of blocks transferred so far, a block size
   in bytes, and the total size of the file.  The third argument may
   be ``-1`` on older FTP servers which do not return a file size in
   response to a retrieval request.

   If the *url* uses the ``http:`` scheme identifier, the optional
   *data* argument may be given to specify a ``POST`` request
   (normally the request type is ``GET``).  The *data* argument must
   in standard *application/x-www-form-urlencoded* format; see the
   ``urlencode()`` function below.

   Changed in version 2.5: ``urlretrieve()`` will raise
   ``ContentTooShortError`` when it detects that the amount of data
   available  was less than the expected amount (which is the size
   reported by a  *Content-Length* header). This can occur, for
   example, when the  download is interrupted.The *Content-Length* is
   treated as a lower bound: if there's more data  to read,
   urlretrieve reads more data, but if less data is available,  it
   raises the exception.You can still retrieve the downloaded data in
   this case, it is stored  in the ``content`` attribute of the
   exception instance.If no *Content-Length* header was supplied,
   urlretrieve can not check the size of the data it has downloaded,
   and just returns it.  In this case you just have to assume that the
   download was successful.

urllib._urlopener

   The public functions ``urlopen()`` and ``urlretrieve()`` create an
   instance of the ``FancyURLopener`` class and use it to perform
   their requested actions.  To override this functionality,
   programmers can create a subclass of ``URLopener`` or
   ``FancyURLopener``, then assign an instance of that class to the
   ``urllib._urlopener`` variable before calling the desired function.
   For example, applications may want to specify a different *User-
   Agent* header than ``URLopener`` defines.  This can be accomplished
   with the following code:

      import urllib

      class AppURLopener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
          version = "App/1.7"

      urllib._urlopener = AppURLopener()

urllib.urlcleanup()

   Clear the cache that may have been built up by previous calls to
   ``urlretrieve()``.


Utility functions
=================

urllib.quote(string[, safe])

   Replace special characters in *string* using the ``%xx`` escape.
   Letters, digits, and the characters ``'_.-'`` are never quoted. By
   default, this function is intended for quoting the path section of
   the URL.The optional *safe* parameter specifies additional
   characters that should not be quoted --- its default value is
   ``'/'``.

   Example: ``quote('/~connolly/')`` yields ``'/%7econnolly/'``.

urllib.quote_plus(string[, safe])

   Like ``quote()``, but also replaces spaces by plus signs, as
   required for quoting HTML form values when building up a query
   string to go into a URL. Plus signs in the original string are
   escaped unless they are included in *safe*.  It also does not have
   *safe* default to ``'/'``.

urllib.unquote(string)

   Replace ``%xx`` escapes by their single-character equivalent.

   Example: ``unquote('/%7Econnolly/')`` yields ``'/~connolly/'``.

urllib.unquote_plus(string)

   Like ``unquote()``, but also replaces plus signs by spaces, as
   required for unquoting HTML form values.

urllib.urlencode(query[, doseq])

   Convert a mapping object or a sequence of two-element tuples to a
   "url-encoded" string, suitable to pass to ``urlopen()`` above as
   the optional *data* argument.  This is useful to pass a dictionary
   of form fields to a ``POST`` request.  The resulting string is a
   series of ``key=value`` pairs separated by ``'&'`` characters,
   where both *key* and *value* are quoted using ``quote_plus()``
   above.  When a sequence of two-element tuples is used as the
   *query* argument, the first element of each tuple is a key and the
   second is a value. The value element in itself can be a sequence
   and in that case, if the optional parameter *doseq* is evaluates to
   *True*, individual ``key=value`` pairs separated by ``'&'`` are
   generated for each element of the value sequence for the key.  The
   order of parameters in the encoded string will match the order of
   parameter tuples in the sequence. The ``urlparse`` module provides
   the functions ``parse_qs()`` and ``parse_qsl()`` which are used to
   parse query strings into Python data structures.

urllib.pathname2url(path)

   Convert the pathname *path* from the local syntax for a path to the
   form used in the path component of a URL.  This does not produce a
   complete URL.  The return value will already be quoted using the
   ``quote()`` function.

urllib.url2pathname(path)

   Convert the path component *path* from an encoded URL to the local
   syntax for a path.  This does not accept a complete URL.  This
   function uses ``unquote()`` to decode *path*.

urllib.getproxies()

   This helper function returns a dictionary of scheme to proxy server
   URL mappings. It scans the environment for variables named
   ``<scheme>_proxy`` for all operating systems first, and when it
   cannot find it, looks for proxy information from Mac OSX System
   Configuration for Mac OS X and Windows Systems Registry for
   Windows.


URL Opener objects
==================

class class urllib.URLopener([proxies[, **x509]])

   Base class for opening and reading URLs.  Unless you need to
   support opening objects using schemes other than ``http:``,
   ``ftp:``, or ``file:``, you probably want to use
   ``FancyURLopener``.

   By default, the ``URLopener`` class sends a *User-Agent* header of
   ``urllib/VVV``, where *VVV* is the ``urllib`` version number.
   Applications can define their own *User-Agent* header by
   subclassing ``URLopener`` or ``FancyURLopener`` and setting the
   class attribute ``version`` to an appropriate string value in the
   subclass definition.

   The optional *proxies* parameter should be a dictionary mapping
   scheme names to proxy URLs, where an empty dictionary turns proxies
   off completely.  Its default value is ``None``, in which case
   environmental proxy settings will be used if present, as discussed
   in the definition of ``urlopen()``, above.

   Additional keyword parameters, collected in *x509*, may be used for
   authentication of the client when using the ``https:`` scheme.  The
   keywords *key_file* and *cert_file* are supported to provide an
   SSL key and certificate; both are needed to support client
   authentication.

   ``URLopener`` objects will raise an ``IOError`` exception if the
   server returns an error code.

      open(fullurl[, data])

         Open *fullurl* using the appropriate protocol.  This method
         sets up cache and proxy information, then calls the
         appropriate open method with its input arguments.  If the
         scheme is not recognized, ``open_unknown()`` is called. The
         *data* argument has the same meaning as the *data* argument
         of ``urlopen()``.

      open_unknown(fullurl[, data])

         Overridable interface to open unknown URL types.

      retrieve(url[, filename[, reporthook[, data]]])

         Retrieves the contents of *url* and places it in *filename*.
         The return value is a tuple consisting of a local filename
         and either a ``mimetools.Message`` object containing the
         response headers (for remote URLs) or ``None`` (for local
         URLs).  The caller must then open and read the contents of
         *filename*.  If *filename* is not given and the URL refers to
         a local file, the input filename is returned.  If the URL is
         non-local and *filename* is not given, the filename is the
         output of ``tempfile.mktemp()`` with a suffix that matches
         the suffix of the last path component of the input URL.  If
         *reporthook* is given, it must be a function accepting three
         numeric parameters.  It will be called after each chunk of
         data is read from the network.  *reporthook* is ignored for
         local URLs.

         If the *url* uses the ``http:`` scheme identifier, the
         optional *data* argument may be given to specify a ``POST``
         request (normally the request type is ``GET``).  The *data*
         argument must in standard *application/x-www-form-urlencoded*
         format; see the ``urlencode()`` function below.

      version

         Variable that specifies the user agent of the opener object.
         To get ``urllib`` to tell servers that it is a particular
         user agent, set this in a subclass as a class variable or in
         the constructor before calling the base constructor.

class class urllib.FancyURLopener(...)

   ``FancyURLopener`` subclasses ``URLopener`` providing default
   handling for the following HTTP response codes: 301, 302, 303, 307
   and 401.  For the 30x response codes listed above, the *Location*
   header is used to fetch the actual URL.  For 401 response codes
   (authentication required), basic HTTP authentication is performed.
   For the 30x response codes, recursion is bounded by the value of
   the *maxtries* attribute, which defaults to 10.

   For all other response codes, the method ``http_error_default()``
   is called which you can override in subclasses to handle the error
   appropriately.

   Note: According to the letter of **RFC 2616**, 301 and 302 responses to
     POST requests must not be automatically redirected without
     confirmation by the user.  In reality, browsers do allow
     automatic redirection of these responses, changing the POST to a
     GET, and ``urllib`` reproduces this behaviour.

   The parameters to the constructor are the same as those for
   ``URLopener``.

      Note: When performing basic authentication, a ``FancyURLopener``
        instance calls its ``prompt_user_passwd()`` method.  The
        default implementation asks the users for the required
        information on the controlling terminal.  A subclass may
        override this method to support more appropriate behavior if
        needed.

     The ``FancyURLopener`` class offers one additional method that
     should be overloaded to provide the appropriate behavior:

     prompt_user_passwd(host, realm)

        Return information needed to authenticate the user at the
        given host in the specified security realm.  The return value
        should be a tuple, ``(user, password)``, which can be used for
        basic authentication.

        The implementation prompts for this information on the
        terminal; an application should override this method to use an
        appropriate interaction model in the local environment.

exception exception urllib.ContentTooShortError(msg[, content])

   This exception is raised when the ``urlretrieve()`` function
   detects that the amount of the downloaded data is less than the
   expected amount (given by the *Content-Length* header). The
   ``content`` attribute stores the downloaded (and supposedly
   truncated) data.

   New in version 2.5.


``urllib`` Restrictions
=======================

* Currently, only the following protocols are supported: HTTP,
  (versions 0.9 and 1.0),  FTP, and local files.

* The caching feature of ``urlretrieve()`` has been disabled until I
  find the time to hack proper processing of Expiration time headers.

* There should be a function to query whether a particular URL is in
  the cache.

* For backward compatibility, if a URL appears to point to a local
  file but the file can't be opened, the URL is re-interpreted using
  the FTP protocol.  This can sometimes cause confusing error
  messages.

* The ``urlopen()`` and ``urlretrieve()`` functions can cause
  arbitrarily long delays while waiting for a network connection to be
  set up.  This means that it is difficult to build an interactive Web
  client using these functions without using threads.

* The data returned by ``urlopen()`` or ``urlretrieve()`` is the raw
  data returned by the server.  This may be binary data (such as an
  image), plain text or (for example) HTML.  The HTTP protocol
  provides type information in the reply header, which can be
  inspected by looking at the *Content-Type* header.  If the returned
  data is HTML, you can use the module ``htmllib`` to parse it.

* The code handling the FTP protocol cannot differentiate between a
  file and a directory.  This can lead to unexpected behavior when
  attempting to read a URL that points to a file that is not
  accessible.  If the URL ends in a ``/``, it is assumed to refer to a
  directory and will be handled accordingly.  But if an attempt to
  read a file leads to a 550 error (meaning the URL cannot be found or
  is not accessible, often for permission reasons), then the path is
  treated as a directory in order to handle the case when a directory
  is specified by a URL but the trailing ``/`` has been left off.
  This can cause misleading results when you try to fetch a file whose
  read permissions make it inaccessible; the FTP code will try to read
  it, fail with a 550 error, and then perform a directory listing for
  the unreadable file. If fine-grained control is needed, consider
  using the ``ftplib`` module, subclassing ``FancyURLOpener``, or
  changing *_urlopener* to meet your needs.

* This module does not support the use of proxies which require
  authentication. This may be implemented in the future.

* Although the ``urllib`` module contains (undocumented) routines to
  parse and unparse URL strings, the recommended interface for URL
  manipulation is in module ``urlparse``.


Examples
========

Here is an example session that uses the ``GET`` method to retrieve a
URL containing parameters:

   >>> import urllib
   >>> params = urllib.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
   >>> f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/query?%s" % params)
   >>> print f.read()

The following example uses the ``POST`` method instead:

   >>> import urllib
   >>> params = urllib.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
   >>> f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/query", params)
   >>> print f.read()

The following example uses an explicitly specified HTTP proxy,
overriding environment settings:

   >>> import urllib
   >>> proxies = {'http': 'http://proxy.example.com:8080/'}
   >>> opener = urllib.FancyURLopener(proxies)
   >>> f = opener.open("http://www.python.org")
   >>> f.read()

The following example uses no proxies at all, overriding environment
settings:

   >>> import urllib
   >>> opener = urllib.FancyURLopener({})
   >>> f = opener.open("http://www.python.org/")
   >>> f.read()
