urlopen
- urlopen(url, data=None, [timeout, ]*, context=None)
Open the URL url, which can be either a string or a Request object. *data* must be an object specifying additional data to be sent to the server, or None if no such data is needed. See Request for details. urllib.request module uses HTTP/1.1 and includes a "Connection:close" header in its HTTP requests. The optional *timeout* parameter specifies a timeout in seconds for blocking operations like the connection attempt (if not specified, the global default timeout setting will be used). This only works for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP connections. If *context* is specified, it must be a ssl.SSLContext instance describing the various SSL options. See HTTPSConnection for more details. This function always returns an object which can work as a context manager and has the properties url, headers, and status. See urllib.response.addinfourl for more detail on these properties. For HTTP and HTTPS URLs, this function returns a http.client.HTTPResponse object slightly modified. In addition to the three new methods above, the msg attribute contains the same information as the reason attribute --- the reason phrase returned by the server --- instead of the response headers as it is specified in the documentation for HTTPResponse. For FTP, file, and data URLs, this function returns a urllib.response.addinfourl object. Note that None may be returned if no handler handles the request (though the default installed global OpenerDirector uses UnknownHandler to ensure this never happens). In addition, if proxy settings are detected (for example, when a *_proxy environment variable like http_proxy is set), ProxyHandler is default installed and makes sure the requests are handled through the proxy.
© Python Software Foundation. PSF License Version 2 · Official docs ↗
Changed in 3.2, 3.3, 3.4.3, 3.10, 3.13
- 3.2: cafile and capath were added. HTTPS virtual hosts are now supported if possible (that is, if ssl.HAS_SNI is true). data can be an iterable object.
- 3.3: cadefault was added.
- 3.4.3: context was added.
- 3.10: HTTPS connection now send an ALPN extension with protocol indicator http/1.1 when no context is given. Custom context should set ALPN protocols with set_alpn_protocols().
- 3.13: Remove cafile, capath and cadefault parameters: use the context parameter instead.
1 Example
>>> import urllib.request >>> with urllib.request.urlopen('https://www.python.org/') as f: ... # The response may be compressed (for example, 'gzip'). ... print(f.headers.get('Content-Encoding')) ... data = f.read() ... if f.headers.get('Content-Encoding') == 'gzip': ... import gzip ... data = gzip.decompress(data) ... print(data[:300].decode('utf-8', errors='replace'))
from the Python docs