Angry Objects

'Python' Category

• Oct

  15

  2011

  HTTP with Python – PycURL by Example

  A colleague of mine recently remarked something along the lines of “whenever I need to do HTTP client stuff in any language, I usually go look for cURL bindings straight away”, and I’m starting to agree on that one. HTTP is hard to do right, and cURL has a track record of doing HTTP right. If you don’t know what cURL is, take a look at http://curl.haxx.se
  Using PycURL, I was able to implement my use cases in a snap. Then I wondered – why isn’t this module more popular among Python developers? The PycURL website already states the reasons – it doesn’t have a very Pythonic interface as it is a thin layer over libcurl (which is implemented in C), and it takes some knowledge of the cURL C API to put it to effective use. The first reason I can’t really help with, but I’ll be focusing on the second – gaining some knowledge of the underlying API. I’ll try to explain how this API works by implementing a number of use cases using PycURL.

  posted in Programming, Python by objectified