Fetching data from the Internet

What is Urllib2?

urllib2 is a Python module for fetching URLs.

What can it do?

It offers a very simple interface, in the form of the urlopen function.

Urlopen is capable of fetching URLs using a variety of different protocols like
(http, ftp, file).

It also offers an interface for handling basic authentication, cookies, proxies
and so on.

These are provided by objects called handlers and openers.

HTTP Requests

HTTP is based on requests and responses, in that the client makes requests and
the servers send responses.

This response is a file-like object, which means you can for example call .read()
on the response.

How can I use it?

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org/')
html = response.read()

User Agents

You can also add your own headers with urllib2.

Some websites dislike being browsed by programs.

By default urllib2 identifies itself as Python-urllib/x.y (where x and y are
the major and minor version numbers of the Python release,
which may confuse the site, or just plain not work.

The way a browser identifies itself is through the User-Agent header.

See our Urllib2 User Agent post that describes how to use that in a program.

Get HTTP Headers

Let’s write a small script that will get the HTTP headers from a website.

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.python.org")
print "-" * 20
print "URL : ", response.geturl()

headers = response.info()
print "-" * 20
print "This prints the header: ", headers
print "-" * 20
print "Date :", headers['date']
print "-" * 20
print "Server Name: ", headers['Server']
print "-" * 20
print "Last-Modified: ", headers['Last-Modified']
print "-" * 20
print "ETag: ", headers['ETag']
print "-" * 20
print "Content-Length: ", headers['Content-Length']
print "-" * 20
print "Connection: ", headers['Connection']
print "-" * 20
print "Content-Type: ", headers['Content-Type']
print "-" * 20

Will give an output similar to this:

——————–
URL : http://www.python.org
——————–
This prints the header: Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:09:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:36:55 GMT
ETag: “105800d-4de0-4cbd035514fc0”
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 19936
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

——————–
Date : Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:09:40 GMT
——————–
Server Name: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
——————–
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:36:55 GMT
——————–
ETag: “105800d-4de0-4cbd035514fc0”
——————–
Content-Length: 19936
——————–
Connection: close
——————–
Content-Type: text/html
——————–