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).

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.

• 11.1 Standard Module cgi
  • 11.1.1 Introduction
  • 11.1.2 Using the cgi module
  • 11.1.3 Old classes
  • 11.1.4 Functions
  • 11.1.5 Caring about security
  • 11.1.6 Installing your CGI script on a Unix system
  • 11.1.7 Testing your CGI script
  • 11.1.8 Debugging CGI scripts
  • 11.1.9 Common problems and solutions
• 11.2 Standard Module urllib
• 11.3 Standard Module httplib
  • 11.3.1 HTTP Objects
  • 11.3.2 Example
• 11.4 Standard Module ftplib
  • 11.4.1 FTP Objects
• 11.5 Standard Module gopherlib
• 11.6 Standard Module nntplib
  • 11.6.1 NNTP Objects
• 11.7 Standard Module urlparse
• 11.8 Standard Module sgmllib
• 11.9 Standard Module htmllib
• 11.10 Standard Module formatter
  • 11.10.1 The Formatter Interface
  • 11.10.2 Formatter Implementations
  • 11.10.3 The Writer Interface
  • 11.10.4 Writer Implementations
• 11.11 Standard Module rfc822
  • 11.11.1 Message Objects
• 11.12 Standard Module mimetools
  • 11.12.1 Additional Methods of Message objects
• 11.13 Standard module binhex
  • 11.13.1 notes
• 11.14 Standard module uu
• 11.15 Built-in Module binascii
• 11.16 Standard module xdrlib
  • 11.16.1 Packer Objects
  • 11.16.2 Unpacker Objects
  • 11.16.3 Exceptions
  • 11.16.4 Supporting Floating Point Data