What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?

What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python if I know the content will be a string? I am searching the documentation for a quick one-liner like:

contents = url.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")

But all I can find using Google are httplib and urllib - and I am unable to find a shortcut in those libraries.

Does standard Python 2.5 have a shortcut in some form as above, or should I write a function url_get?

1. I would prefer not to capture the output of shelling out to wget or curl.

Solution 1:

Python 3:

import urllib.request
contents = urllib.request.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Python 2:

import urllib2
contents = urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Documentation for urllib.request and read.

Solution 2:

You could use a library called requests.

import requests
r = requests.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")

This is quite easy. Then you can do like this:

>>> print(r.status_code)
>>> print(r.headers)
>>> print(r.content)

Solution 3:

If you want solution with httplib2 to be oneliner consider instantiating anonymous Http object

import httplib2
resp, content = httplib2.Http().request("http://example.com/foo/bar")

Solution 4:

Have a look at httplib2, which - next to a lot of very useful features - provides exactly what you want.

import httplib2

resp, content = httplib2.Http().request("http://example.com/foo/bar")

Where content would be the response body (as a string), and resp would contain the status and response headers.

It doesn't come included with a standard python install though (but it only requires standard python), but it's definitely worth checking out.