[Python-Dev] Adding resume (206) support to urllib(2) (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Wed Dec 13 07:17:10 CET 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

I've just been putting together a podcasting doodad and have included resuming support in it. Is this something that's already in the pipeline or should I abstract it out to urllib and submit a patch? Not sure where you got the impression that 206 is "resume"; in my copy of the spec it's "partial content", and you must have put a Range: header into the request to get that in the first place. If I had to use that, I'd implement it right on top of httplib, and wouldn't bother with urllib*: this is really specific to http, and adding it to urllib would break the abstraction.

given that urllib2 already supports partial requests, I'm not sure I see the point of reimplementing this on top of httplib. an example:

import urllib2

request = urllib2.Request("http://www.pythonware.com/daily/index.htm") request.add_header("range", "bytes=0-999")

http_file = urllib2.urlopen(request)

print http_file.headers["content-range"] print len(http_file.read())

this prints:

bytes 0-999/245105 1000

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list