11. Internet and WWW Services

   

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).

imaplib

-- IMAP4 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 parser for HTML documents.

xmllib

-- A parser for XML documents.

formatter

-- Generic output formatter and device interface.

rfc822

-- Parse RFC 822 style mail headers.

mimetools

-- Tools for parsing MIME style message bodies.

binhex

-- Encode and decode files in binhex4 format.

uu

-- Encode and decode files in uuencode format.

binascii

-- Tools for converting between binary and various ascii-encoded binary representation

xdrlib

-- The External Data Representation Standard as described in RFC 1014, written by Sun Microsystems, Inc. June 1987.

mailcap

-- Mailcap file handling. See RFC 1524.

base64

-- Encode/decode binary files using the MIME base64 encoding.

quopri

-- Encode/decode binary files using the MIME quoted-printable encoding.

SocketServer

-- A framework for network servers.

mailbox

-- Read various mailbox formats.

mimify

-- Mimification and unmimification of mail messages.

BaseHTTPServer

-- Basic HTTP server (base class for SimpleHTTPServer and CGIHTTPServer).