ClientCookie is a Python module for
handling HTTP cookies on the client side, useful for accessing web sites that
require cookies to be set and then returned later. It also provides some other
(optional) useful stuff: HTTP-EQUIV and Refresh
handling, automatic adding of the Referer [sic] header, automatic
observance of robots.txt and lazily-seek()able
responses. These extras are implemented using an extension that makes it
easier to add new functionality to urllib2. It has developed from
a port of Gisle Aas' Perl module HTTP::Cookies, from the libwww-perl library.
import ClientCookie response = ClientCookie.urlopen("http://foo.bar.com/")
This function behaves identically to urllib2.urlopen, except
that it deals with cookies automatically. That's probably all you need to
know.
Python 1.5.2 or above is required, and urllib2 is recommended.
If you have 2.1 or above, you've already got a recent enough version of
urllib2. For Python 1.5.2, use this
urllib2 and this
urllib. For Python 2.0, you need the newer versions from
Python 2.1 (available from the source distribution or CVS from http://www.python.org/), or use the
1.5.2-compatible versions. Note that you don't need to replace the original
urllib2 / urllib - you can just make sure they're in
sys.path ahead of the copies from 2.0's standard library.
For full documentation, see here and the docstrings in the module source code.
Other than Gisle, particular thanks to Johnny Lee (MSIE Perl code) and Ronald Tschalar (advice on Netscape cookies).
All documentation (including these web pages) is included in the distribution.
Development release.
Stable release.
For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file included in the distribution.
Cookie, do
this?
No: Cookie.py does the server end of the job. It doesn't know when to accept cookies from a server or when to pass them back.
1.5.2 or above.
No. You probably want it, though.
You don't, but if you want to use the extended urllib2
callables from ClientCookie, and you have Python 2.0, you need to
upgrade to the version from Python 2.1 (or use the 1.5.2-compatible
version). If you have Python 1.5.2, use this
urllib2 and
urllib. Otherwise, you're OK.
The BSD license (included in distribution).
There is more than one protocol, in fact (see the docs for a brief explanation of the history):
Netscape and RFC 2965. RFC 2965 handling is switched off by default.
RFC 2109 cookies are currently parsed as Netscape cookies, and treated
as RFC 2965 cookies thereafter. RFC 2109 is officially obsoleted by RFC
2965. Browsers do use a few RFC 2109 features in their Netscape cookie
implementations (port and max-age), and
ClientCookie knows about that, too.
John J. Lee, May 2004.