Any way to set request headers when doing a request using urllib in Python 2.x?

Question

I am trying to make an HTTP request in Python 2.6.4, using the urllib module. Is there any way to set the request headers?

I am sure that this is possible using urllib2, but I would prefer to use urllib since it seems simpler.

Answer 1

I don't think so, but urllib2 can. Check out the documentation of urllib2.Request.

Answer 2

There isn't any way to do that, which is precisely the reason urllib is deprecated in favour of urllib2. So just use urllib2 rather than writing new code to a deprecated interface.

Answer 3

You could actually overwrite methods in FancyURLopener, but that does not seem right (see http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib._urlopener). You could also use httplib which basically is the backend for urllib.

But anyhow, using urllib2 might be the best idea. It is not difficult to use. (I use it all the time.)