urllib.request

An extensible library for opening URLs using a variety of protocols

The simplest way to use this module is to call the urlopen function,
which accepts a string containing a URL or a Request object (described
below).  It opens the URL and returns the results as file-like
object; the returned object has some extra methods described below.

The OpenerDirector manages a collection of Handler objects that do
all the actual work.  Each Handler implements a particular protocol or
option.  The OpenerDirector is a composite object that invokes the
Handlers needed to open the requested URL.  For example, the
HTTPHandler performs HTTP GET and POST requests and deals with
non-error returns.  The HTTPRedirectHandler automatically deals with
HTTP 301, 302, 303, 307, and 308 redirect errors, and the
HTTPDigestAuthHandler deals with digest authentication.

urlopen(url, data=None) -- Basic usage is the same as original
urllib.  pass the url and optionally data to post to an HTTP URL, and
get a file-like object back.  One difference is that you can also pass
a Request instance instead of URL.  Raises a URLError (subclass of
OSError); for HTTP errors, raises an HTTPError, which can also be
treated as a valid response.

build_opener -- Function that creates a new OpenerDirector instance.
Will install the default handlers.  Accepts one or more Handlers as
arguments, either instances or Handler classes that it will
instantiate.  If one of the argument is a subclass of the default
handler, the argument will be installed instead of the default.

install_opener -- Installs a new opener as the default opener.

objects of interest:

OpenerDirector -- Sets up the User Agent as the Python-urllib client and manages
the Handler classes, while dealing with requests and responses.

Request -- An object that encapsulates the state of a request.  The
state can be as simple as the URL.  It can also include extra HTTP
headers, e.g. a User-Agent.

BaseHandler --

internals:
BaseHandler and parent
_call_chain conventions

Example usage:

import urllib.request

# set up authentication info
authinfo = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
authinfo.add_password(realm='PDQ Application',
                      uri='https://mahler:8092/site-updates.py',
                      user='klem',
                      passwd='geheim$parole')

proxy_support = urllib.request.ProxyHandler({"http" : "http://ahad-haam:3128"})

# build a new opener that adds authentication and caching FTP handlers
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(proxy_support, authinfo,
                                     urllib.request.CacheFTPHandler)

# install it
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)

f = urllib.request.urlopen('https://www.python.org/')

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