Doc/libwww.tex

   1 \chapter{Internet and WWW Services}
   2 \nodename{Internet and WWW}
   3 \label{www}
   4 \index{WWW}
   5 \index{Internet}
   6 \index{World-Wide Web}
   7
   8 The modules described in this chapter provide various services to
   9 World-Wide Web (WWW) clients and/or services, and a few modules
  10 related to news and email.  They are all implemented in Python.  Some
  11 of these modules require the presence of the system-dependent module
  12 \code{sockets}\refbimodindex{socket}, which is currently only fully
  13 supported on \UNIX{} and Windows NT.  Here is an overview:
  14
  15 \begin{description}
  16
  17 \item[cgi]
  18 --- Common Gateway Interface, used to interpret forms in server-side
  19 scripts.
  20
  21 \item[urllib]
  22 --- Open an arbitrary object given by URL (requires sockets).
  23
  24 \item[httplib]
  25 --- HTTP protocol client (requires sockets).
  26
  27 \item[ftplib]
  28 --- FTP protocol client (requires sockets).
  29
  30 \item[gopherlib]
  31 --- Gopher protocol client (requires sockets).
  32
  33 \item[imaplib]
  34 --- IMAP4 protocol client (requires sockets).
  35
  36 \item[nntplib]
  37 --- NNTP protocol client (requires sockets).
  38
  39 \item[urlparse]
  40 --- Parse a URL string into a tuple (addressing scheme identifier, network
  41 location, path, parameters, query string, fragment identifier).
  42
  43 \item[sgmllib]
  44 --- Only as much of an SGML parser as needed to parse HTML.
  45
  46 \item[htmllib]
  47 --- A parser for HTML documents.
  48
  49 \item[xmllib]
  50 --- A parser for XML documents.
  51
  52 \item[formatter]
  53 --- Generic output formatter and device interface.
  54
  55 \item[rfc822]
  56 --- Parse \rfc{822} style mail headers.
  57
  58 \item[mimetools]
  59 --- Tools for parsing MIME style message bodies.
  60
  61 \item[binhex]
  62 --- Encode and decode files in binhex4 format.
  63
  64 \item[uu]
  65 --- Encode and decode files in uuencode format.
  66
  67 \item[binascii]
  68 --- Tools for converting between binary and various ascii-encoded binary
  69 representation
  70
  71 \item[xdrlib]
  72 --- The External Data Representation Standard as described in \rfc{1014},
  73 written by Sun Microsystems, Inc. June 1987.
  74
  75 \item[mailcap]
  76 --- Mailcap file handling.  See \rfc{1524}.
  77
  78 \item[base64]
  79 --- Encode/decode binary files using the MIME base64 encoding.
  80
  81 \item[quopri]
  82 --- Encode/decode binary files using the MIME quoted-printable encoding.
  83
  84 \item[SocketServer]
  85 --- A framework for network servers.
  86
  87 \item[mailbox]
  88 --- Read various mailbox formats.
  89
  90 \item[mimify]
  91 --- Mimification and unmimification of mail messages.
  92
  93 \item[BaseHTTPServer]
  94 --- Basic HTTP server (base class for SimpleHTTPServer and CGIHTTPServer).
  95
  96 \end{description}