Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

Customizing requests with urllib

To make use of the functionality that headers provide, we add headers to a request before sending it. To do this, we need to follow these steps:

1. Create a Request object.
2. Add headers to the Request object.
3. Use urlopen() to send the Request object.

We're going to learn how to customize a request to retrieve a Netherlands version of the Debian home page. We will use the Accept-Language header, which tells the server our preferred language for the resource it returns.

First, we create a Request object:

>>> from urllib.request import Request,urlopen >>> req = Request('http://www.debian.org')

Next, we add the header:

>>> req.add_header('Accept-Language', 'nl')

The add_header() method takes the name of the header ...