11. Internet Protocols and Support

The modules described in this chapter implement Internet protocols and support for related technology. They are all implemented in Python. Most of these modules require the presence of the system-dependent module socket, which is currently supported on most popular platforms. Here is an overview:

webbrowser   Easy-to-use controller for Web browsers.
cgi   Common Gateway Interface support, used to interpret forms in server-side scripts.
cgitb   Configurable traceback handler for CGI scripts.
urllib   Open an arbitrary network resource by URL (requires sockets).
urllib2   An extensible library for opening URLs using a variety of protocols
httplib   HTTP and HTTPS protocol client (requires sockets).
ftplib   FTP protocol client (requires sockets).
gopherlib   Gopher protocol client (requires sockets).
poplib   POP3 protocol client (requires sockets).
imaplib   IMAP4 protocol client (requires sockets).
nntplib   NNTP protocol client (requires sockets).
smtplib   SMTP protocol client (requires sockets).
smtpd   Implement a flexible SMTP server
telnetlib   Telnet client class.
urlparse   Parse URLs into components.
SocketServer   A framework for network servers.
BaseHTTPServer   Basic HTTP server (base class for SimpleHTTPServer and CGIHTTPServer).
SimpleHTTPServer   This module provides a basic request handler for HTTP servers.
CGIHTTPServer   This module provides a request handler for HTTP servers which can run CGI scripts.
cookielib   Cookie handling for HTTP clients
Cookie   Support for HTTP state management (cookies).
xmlrpclib   XML-RPC client access.
SimpleXMLRPCServer   Basic XML-RPC server implementation.
DocXMLRPCServer   Self-documenting XML-RPC server implementation.
asyncore   A base class for developing asynchronous socket handling services.
asynchat   Support for asynchronous command/response protocols.

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