Internet and WWW Services

Internet and WWW

The modules described in this chapter provide various services to World-Wide Web (WWW) clients and/or services, and a few modules related to news and email. They are all implemented in Python. Some of these modules require the presence of the system-dependent module sockets, which is currently only fully supported on Unix and Windows NT. Here is an overview:

cgi
— Common Gateway Interface, used to interpret forms in server-side scripts.

urllib
— Open an arbitrary object given by URL (requires sockets).

httplib
— HTTP protocol client (requires sockets).

ftplib
— FTP protocol client (requires sockets).

gopherlib
— Gopher protocol client (requires sockets).

nntplib
— NNTP protocol client (requires sockets).

urlparse
— Parse a URL string into a tuple (addressing scheme identifier, network location, path, parameters, query string, fragment identifier).

sgmllib
— Only as much of an SGML parser as needed to parse HTML.

htmllib
— A (slow) parser for HTML documents.

formatter
— Generic output formatter and device interface.

rfc822
— Parse RFC-822 style mail headers.

mimetools
— Tools for parsing MIME style message bodies.