Consuming HTTP Services in Python Transcripts
Chapter: HTTP services with Python builtins
Lecture: Introduction to Python's builtin HTTP clients
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0:02
Where are we in the course? Well, we are still in the http client area, but we are going to be focusing on the builtins, that is urllib2 and urllib
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depending on whether you are on Python 2 or Python 3. Actually, there is a little bit of confusion about that, which is better,
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should I use urllib or should I use urllib2, well, that kind of depends on whether you are working with Python 2 or Python 3,
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so here we are in the documentation for Python 2 and notice that we have a urllib,
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it says open an arbitrary network resource by url, okay, that's cool, maybe I should use this to talk to services if I want to just use the built in,
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oh wait, there is also urllib2 which is urllib but even better, maybe twice as good,
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I don't know, what the 2 stands for, just the next generation, urllib opening library.
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So, this is a weird sort of historical confusion that you might run into just if you are doing Python 2, so we are going to focus on urllib 2
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and we are going to basically disregard urllib from Python 2. Okay, well that said, we are going to see that
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we are actually going to use urllib in Python 3, so let's compare these side by side to make sense of this.
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Python 2 has two versions an older version urllib and the new version you just saw urllib 2,
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so that is what we should work with, if we are doing Python 2; In Python 3, they made a number of breaking changes
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from going from 2 to 3, one of them was that is kind of crazy, why do we have all these versions of urllib,
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we are just going to create a new even better urllib that is the Python 3 urllib, and along that path they actually decided to refactor
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and break apart the urllib module into a number of pieces, this included urllib.request where you actually will use that
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to do the request and urllib error for checking for errors and there is a few other urllib submodules as well in Python 3.
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Now, the question you might ask is why would I use either of these when I could use requests, what you are going to see, not so much here,
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but dramatically so as we get in farther down the line, is that these APIs are not as clean and simple and intuitive as the request APIs,
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so if you got to choose, use request, there is absolutely no doubt about use request, use request, like so many people are making that choice,
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that is why it's downloaded seven million times a month, but, if you are going to write a Python app or script,
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and you need to do a little bit of network work, http work or something like this, and it has no dependencies whatsoever, except if you use request
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that now has a dependency, getting it installed is trickier and so on, if you want to write a script that literally has no dependencies,
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you might consider using urllib if that is the one thing that would have pushed you into having external dependencies.
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That said, it's up to you whether or not you use request or you use this style,
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I'll show you this in Python 2, I'll show you in Python 3, but if you got a choice, absolutely use request, it's a better API.
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Finally, before we dig into the details of these two different APIs, it's worth pointing out that the Python core developers
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and the language team met and considered whether they might make request actually part of the standard library, they might bring request into here
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to basically replace urllib in Python 3 and they decided not to, not because it wasn't important enough to sort of stand parallel
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to the urllib story in Python 3, but they said look we only ship new Python distributions infrequently, and we don't want to hobble the package request
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and tie it down to these various slow release dates especially because you are working on the network,
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there might be network security issues or voulnerabilities that you need to quickly roll out a new version of request for
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and you don't want to wait for CPython to rev entirely. So it's just interesting to think that the Python team
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actually considered making request part of the builtins of Python and choose not to so as to keep request live and vibrant.