[Httplib2-discuss] Feedback on httplib2

[Simon W. <swi...@gm...>]

I've been playing with httplib2 and so far I like it - it sucks an  
awful lot less than the stuff in the standard library. That said,  
here are a few observations.

1. If you give it a URL to a site that is down / doesn't exist you  
get a low level socket error. It would be nice if this was a  
documented httplib2 exception.

 >>> import httplib2
 >>> httplib2.Http().request('http://non-existant-domain-oeu.com')
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
   File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 781, in request
     (response, content) = self._request(conn, authority, uri,  
request_uri, method, body, headers, redirections, cachekey)
   File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 603, in _request
     (response, content) = self._conn_request(conn, request_uri,  
method, body, headers)
   File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 581, in _conn_request
     conn.connect()
   File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/ 
python2.3/httplib.py", line 535, in connect
     socket.SOCK_STREAM):
socket.gaierror: (7, 'No address associated with nodename')
 >>>

2. I'm a little uncomfortable with the way authentication works - it  
seems like it would be very easy to add some credentials and then  
forget to clear them, potentially passing them to other sites as you  
reuse the Http() instance. I would prefer something like this:

http = Http()
http.add_credentials('https://del.icio.us/', 'username', 'password')

That way the class knows to only send that username and password to  
URLs that start with https://del.icio.us/. Is there a reason this  
isn't done at the moment?

3. Finally, I ran in to a gotcha when doing a POST request: the  
service I was talking to required me to include a Content-Type:  
application/x-www-form-urlencoded header. It would be nice if one of  
the examples in the documentation showed this - it would have saved  
me quite a bit of debugging.

On that last note, has any consideration been given to adding a  
convenience method for the common case where you wish to POST a  
dictionary of name/value pairs? Something like the following:

http = Http()
http.post_form(url, {'name': 'value'})

The post_form method would run urllib.urlencode on the argument  
dictionary and automatically add the application/x-www-form-urlencode  
header.

Thanks,

Simon Willison