Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Consuming HTTP


You might be interacting with a third-party service based on HTTP REST APIs, or you might be fetching content from a third party or just downloading a file that your software needs as the input. It doesn't really matter. Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to write an application and ignore HTTP; you will have to face it sooner or later. People expect HTTP support from all kind of applications. If you are writing an image viewer, they probably expect to be able to throw a URL that leads to an image to it and see it appear.

While they have never been really user friendly and obvious, the Python standard library has always had ways to interact with HTTP, and they are available out of the box.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

  1. The urllib.request module provides the machinery required to submit an HTTP request. A light wrapper around it can solve most needs in terms of using HTTP:
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
import json


def http_request(url,...