Source Interface with Python and Urllib2

Source interface with Python and urllib2

Unfortunately the stack of standard library modules in use (urllib2, httplib, socket) is somewhat badly designed for the purpose -- at the key point in the operation, HTTPConnection.connect (in httplib) delegates to socket.create_connection, which in turn gives you no "hook" whatsoever between the creation of the socket instance sock and the sock.connect call, for you to insert the sock.bind just before sock.connect that is what you need to set the source IP (I'm evangelizing widely for NOT designing abstractions in such an airtight, excessively-encapsulated way -- I'll be speaking about that at OSCON this Thursday under the title "Zen and the Art of Abstraction Maintenance" -- but here your problem is how to deal with a stack of abstractions that WERE designed this way, sigh).

When you're facing such problems you only have two not-so-good solutions: either copy, paste and edit the misdesigned code into which you need to place a "hook" that the original designer didn't cater for; or, "monkey-patch" that code. Neither is GOOD, but both can work, so at least let's be thankful that we have such options (by using an open-source and dynamic language). In this case, I think I'd go for monkey-patching (which is bad, but copy and paste coding is even worse) -- a code fragment such as:

import socket
true_socket = socket.socket
def bound_socket(*a, **k):
    sock = true_socket(*a, **k)
    sock.bind((sourceIP, 0))
    return sock
socket.socket = bound_socket

Depending on your exact needs (do you need all sockets to be bound to the same source IP, or...?) you could simply run this before using urllib2 normally, or (in more complex ways of course) run it at need just for those outgoing sockets you DO need to bind in a certain way (then each time restore socket.socket = true_socket to get out of the way for future sockets yet to be created). The second alternative adds its own complications to orchestrate properly, so I'm waiting for you to clarify whether you do need such complications before explaining them all.

AKX's good answer is a variant on the "copy / paste / edit" alternative so I don't need to expand much on that -- note however that it doesn't exactly reproduce socket.create_connection in its connect method, see the source here (at the very end of the page) and decide what other functionality of the create_connection function you may want to embody in your copied/pasted/edited version if you decide to go that route.

What are the differences between the urllib, urllib2, urllib3 and requests module?

I know it's been said already, but I'd highly recommend the requests Python package.

If you've used languages other than python, you're probably thinking urllib and urllib2 are easy to use, not much code, and highly capable, that's how I used to think. But the requests package is so unbelievably useful and short that everyone should be using it.

First, it supports a fully restful API, and is as easy as:

import requests

resp = requests.get('http://www.mywebsite.com/user')
resp = requests.post('http://www.mywebsite.com/user')
resp = requests.put('http://www.mywebsite.com/user/put')
resp = requests.delete('http://www.mywebsite.com/user/delete')

Regardless of whether GET / POST, you never have to encode parameters again, it simply takes a dictionary as an argument and is good to go:

userdata = {"firstname": "John", "lastname": "Doe", "password": "jdoe123"}
resp = requests.post('http://www.mywebsite.com/user', data=userdata)

Plus it even has a built in JSON decoder (again, I know json.loads() isn't a lot more to write, but this sure is convenient):

resp.json()

Or if your response data is just text, use:

resp.text

This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the list of features from the requests site:

• International Domains and URLs
• Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
• Sessions with Cookie Persistence
• Browser-style SSL Verification
• Basic/Digest Authentication
• Elegant Key/Value Cookies
• Automatic Decompression
• Unicode Response Bodies
• Multipart File Uploads
• Connection Timeouts
• .netrc support
• List item
• Python 2.7, 3.6—3.9
• Thread-safe.

Import error: No module name urllib2

As stated in the urllib2 documentation:

The urllib2 module has been split across several modules in Python 3 named urllib.request and urllib.error. The 2to3 tool will automatically adapt imports when converting your sources to Python 3.

So you should instead be saying

from urllib.request import urlopen
html = urlopen("http://www.google.com/").read()
print(html)

Your current, now-edited code sample is incorrect because you are saying urllib.urlopen("http://www.google.com/") instead of just urlopen("http://www.google.com/").

Python: urllib/urllib2/httplib confusion

Focus on urllib2 for this, it works quite well. Don't mess with httplib, it's not the top-level API.

What you're noting is that urllib2 doesn't follow the redirect.

You need to fold in an instance of HTTPRedirectHandler that will catch and follow the redirects.

Further, you may want to subclass the default HTTPRedirectHandler to capture information that you'll then check as part of your unit testing.

cookie_handler= urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor( self.cookies )
redirect_handler= HTTPRedirectHandler()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(redirect_handler,cookie_handler)

You can then use this opener object to POST and GET, handling redirects and cookies properly.

You may want to add your own subclass of HTTPHandler to capture and log various error codes, also.

Changing the IP address for urllib2

Try using the following code:

import urllib.request  as urllib2

proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http": "118.69.140.108:53281"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
page = urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/")

Alternatively you can use the requests library which makes it easier:

import requests

url = "http://example.com/"
page = requests.get(url, proxies={"http":"118.69.140.108:53281"})

hope this helps

---

Related Topics