11. Internet Protocols and Support

The modules described in this chapter implement Internet protocols and support for related technology. They are all implemented in Python. Some of these modules require the presence of the system-dependent module socket, which is currently only fully supported on Unix and Windows NT. Here is an overview:

cgi	Common Gateway Interface support, used to interpret forms in server-side scripts.
urllib	Open an arbitrary object given by URL (requires sockets).
httplib	HTTP protocol client (requires sockets).
ftplib	FTP protocol client (requires sockets).
gopherlib	Gopher protocol client (requires sockets).
poplib	POP3 protocol client (requires sockets).
imaplib	IMAP4 protocol client (requires sockets).
nntplib	NNTP protocol client (requires sockets).
smtplib	SMTP protocol client (requires sockets).
urlparse	Parse URLs into components.
SocketServer	A framework for network servers.
BaseHTTPServer	Basic HTTP server (base class for SimpleHTTPServer and CGIHTTPServer).