[Python-Dev] urllib, multipart/form-data encoding and file uploads (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Fri Jun 27 17:40:40 CEST 2008

I notice that there is some work being done on urllib / urllib2 for python 2.6/3.0. One thing I've always missed in urllib/urllib2 is the facility to encode POST data as multipart/form-data. I think it would also be useful to be able to stream a POST request to the remote server rather than having requiring the user to create the entire POST body in memory before starting the request. This would be extremely useful when writing any kind of code that does file uploads.

I didn't see any recent discussion about this so I thought I'd ask here: do you think this would make a good addition to the new urllib package?

I think it would be very helpful. I'd separate the two things, though; you want to be able to format a set of values as "multipart/form-data", and do various things with that resulting "document", and you want to be able to stream a POST (or PUT) request.

Bill

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